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THE BOOK OF WONDER

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

*THE GODS OF PEGANA. THIRD EDITION
TIME AND THE GODS
THE SWORD OF WELLERAN
A DREAMER'S TALES
FIVE PLAYS

"FIFTY-ONE TALES. THIRD EDITION
With a new Portrait

"TALES OF WONDER. SECOND EDITION

PLAYS OF GODS AND MEN

TALES OF WAR
*UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS

* Uniform with this Volume

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

THE
BOOK OF WONDER

A CHRONICLE OF LITTLE ADVENTURES
AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

LORD DUNSANY

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

S. H. SIME

LONDON

ELKIN MATHEWS, CORK STREET
MCMXIX

(Jfc&fe

Published .... 79/2
Second Edition .... 79/9

PREFACE

COME with me, ladies and
gentlemen who are in any wise
weary of London : come with
me : and those that tire at all
of the world we know : for
we have new worlds here.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MY thanks are due to the Editor of The
Sketch for permission to reprint here twelve of
these tales, which as " Episodes from the Book
of Wonder " were printed in his columns.
Many were abbreviated to suit the exigencies
of the Paper and are here given in full.

I again offer my thanks to the Editor of The
Saturday Review for permission to reprint tales,
the two last in the book.

CONTENTS

PAGE:

THE BRIDE OF THE MAN-HORSE • * ^ . ' i

THE DISTRESSING TALE OF THANGOBRIND THE
JEWELLER, AND OF THE DOOM THAT BEFELL

HIM . . . . . ...'.-••'. 9

THE HOUSE OF THE SPHINX „ f ; . . 16

THE PROBABLE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE LITERARY

MEN . . . < '' < '. < . .21

THE INJUDICIOUS PRAYERS OF POMBO THE

IDOLATER . ,« • .' • * t » 28

THE LOOT OF BOMBASHARNA . • . . 35

MlSS CUBBIDGE AND THE DRAGON OF ROMANCE . 43

THE QUEST OF THE QUEEN'S TEARS . ' •' " ' • 49

THE HOARD OF THE GIBBELINS . . . 58

HOW NUTH WOULD HAVE PRACTISED HIS ART UPON

THE GNOLES v . , . . . . 66

How ONE CAME, AS WAS FORETOLD, TO THE CITY

OF NEVER . * , "« .«'..«' 75

THE CORONATION OF MR. THOMAS SHAP * . 83

CHU-BU AND SHEEMISH v . . .... . . . 91

THE WONDERFUL WINDOW * . . . 99.

EPILOGUE . . . . • • . io&

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE EDGE OF THE WORLD . . . Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

ZRETAZOOLA ... . «... • •, - i
THE OMINOUS COUGH . . < „. . ; . 9

THE HOUSE OF THE SPHINX . * . . 16

41 1 WISH I KNEW MORE ABOUT THE WAYS OF

QUEENS " . V • . .... .42

HE FELT AS A MORSEL # . . * . 56

THERE THE GIBBELINS LIVED AND DISCREDITABLY

FED . . » • . . . . 59

THE LEAN, HIGH HOUSE OF THE GNOLES . . 74
THE CITY OF NEVER . ff , „ , . 78

THE CORONATION OF MR. THOMAS SHAP ,. . 90

I ! -

ZRETAZOOLA

THE BOOK OF WONDER

THE BRIDE OF THE MAN-HORSE

ON the morning of his two hundred and fiftieth
year Shepperalk the centaur went to the golden
coffer, wherein the treasure of the centaurs
was, and taking from it the hoarded amulet
that his father, Jyshak, in the years of his
prime, had hammered from mountain gold
and set with opals bartered from the gnomes,
he put it upon his wrist, and said no word, but
walked from his mother's cavern. And he
took with him too that clarion of the centaurs,
that famous silver horn, that in its time had
summoned to surrender seventeen cities of
Man, and for twenty years had brayed at star-
girt walls in the Siege of Tholdenblarna, the
citadel of the gods, what time the centaurs
waged their fabulous war and were not broken
by any force of arms, but retreated slowly in
a cloud of dust before the final miracle of the
gods that They brought in Their desperate
B

THE BOOK OF WONDER

need from Their ultimate armoury. He took
it and strode away, and his mother only
sighed and let him go.

She knew that to-day he would not drink
at the stream coming down from the terraces
of Varpa Niger, the inner land of the moun-
tains, that to-day he would not wonder awhile
at the sunset and afterwards trot back to the
cavern again to sleep on rushes pulled by
rivers that know not Man. She knew that it
was with him as it had been of old with his
father, and with Goom the father of Jyshak,
and long ago with the gods. Therefore she
only sighed and let him go.

But he, coming out from the cavern that
was his home, went for the first time over the
little stream, and going round the corner of
the crags saw glittering beneath him the
mundane plain. And the wind of the autumn
that was gilding the world, rushing up the
slopes of the mountain, beat cold on his naked
flanks. He raised his head and snorted.

" I am a man-horse now \ " he shouted
aloud ; and leaping from crag to crag he
galloped by valley and chasm, by torrent-bed
and scar of avalanche, until he came to the
wandering leagues of the plain, and left behind
him for ever the Athraminaurian mountains.

His goal was Zretazoola, the city of Sombe-

THE BRIDE OF THE MAN-HORSE

lene. What legend of Sombelene's inhuman
beauty or of the wonder of her mystery had
ever floated over the mundane plain to the
fabulous cradle of the centaurs' race, the
Athraminaurian mountains, I do not know.
Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old
sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the
twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty
from however far away, as driftwood is found
at sea from islands not yet discovered : and
this spring-tide or current that visits the blood
of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his
lineage, from the legendary, the old ; it takes
him out to the woodlands, out to the hills ;
he listens to ancient song. So it may be that
Shepperalk's fabulous blood stirred in those
lonely mountains away at the edge of the
world to rumours that only the airy twilight
knew and only confided secretly to the bat,
for Shepperalk was more legendary even than
man. Certain it was that he headed from the
first for the city of Zretazoola, where Sombe-
lene in her temple dwelt ; though all the
mundane plain, its rivers and mountains,
lay between Shepperalk's home and the city
he sought.

When first the feet of the centaur touched
the grass of that soft alluvial earth he blew
for joy upon the silver horn, he pranced and

THE BOOK OF WONDER

caracoled, he gambolled over the leagues ;
pace came to him like a maiden with a lamp,
a new and beautiful wonder ; the wind laughed
as it passed him. He put his head down low
to the scent of the flowers, he lifted it up to be
nearer the unseen stars, he revelled through
kingdoms, took rivers in his stride ; how shall
I tell you, ye that dwell in cities, how shall I
tell you what he felt as he galloped ? He felt
for strength like the towers of Bel-Narana ;
for lightness like those gossamer palaces that
the fairy-spider builds 'twixt heaven and sea
along the coasts of Zith ; for swiftness like
some bird racing up from the morning to sing
in some city's spires before daylight comes.
He was the sworn companion of the wind.
For joy he was as a song ; the lightnings of
his legendary sires, the earlier gods, began to
mix with his blood ; his hooves thundered.
He came to the cities of men, and all men
trembled, for they remembered the ancient
mythical wars, and now they dreaded new
battles and feared for the race of man. Not
by Clio are these wars recorded, history does
not know them, but what of that ? Not all
of us have sat at historians' feet, but all have
learned fable and myth at their mothers'
knees. And there were none that did not fear
strange wars when they saw Shepperalk

THE BRIDE OF THE MAN-HORSE

swerve and leap along the public ways. So
he passed from city to city.

By night he lay down unpanting in the
reeds of some marsh or a forest ; before dawn
he rose triumphant, and hugely drank of some
river in the dark, and splashing out of it would
trot to some high place to find the sunrise,
and to send echoing eastwards the exultant
greetings of his jubilant horn. And lo ! the
sunrise coming up from the echoes, and the
plains new-lit by the day, and the leagues
spinning by like water flung from a top, and
that gay companion, the loudly laughing wind,
and men and the fears of men and their little
cities ; and, after that, great rivers and waste
spaces and huge new hills, and then new lands
beyond them, and more cities of men, and
always the old companion, the glorious wind.
Kingdom by kingdom slipt by, and still his
breath was even. "It is a golden thing to
gallop on good turf in one's youth," said the
young man-horse, the centaur. " Ha, ha/'
said the wind of the hills, and the winds of the
plain answered.

Bells pealed in frantic towers, wise men
consulted parchments, astrologers sought of
the portent from the stars, the aged made
subtle prophecies. "Is he not swift ? " said
the young. " How glad he is," said children.

THE BOOK OF WONDER

Night after night brought him sleep, and
day after day lit his gallop, till he came to
the lands of the Athalonian men who live by
the edges of the mundane plain, and from
them he came to the lands of legend again
such as those in which he was cradled on
the other side of the world, and which fringe
the marge of the world and mix with the
twilight. And there a mighty thought came
into his untired heart, for he knew that
he neared Zretazoola now, the city of
Sombelene.

It was late in the day when he neared it,
and clouds coloured with evening rolled low
on the plain before him ; he galloped on into
their golden mist, and when it hid from his
eyes the sight of things, the dreams in his
heart awoke and romantically he pondered
all those rumours that used to come to him
from Sombelene, because of the fellowship
of fabulous things. She dwelt (said evening
secretly to the bat) in a little temple by a
lone lake-shore. A grove of cypresses screened
her from the city, from Zretazoola of the
climbing ways. And opposite her temple
stood her tomb, her sad lake-sepulchre with
open door, lest her amazing beauty and the
centuries of her youth should ever give rise
to the heresy among men that lovely Sombe-
6

THE BRIDE OF THE MAN-HORSE

lene was immortal : for only her beauty and
her lineage were divine.

Her father had been half centaur and half
god ; her mother was the child of a desert
lion and that sphinx that watches the pyra-
mids ; — she was more mystical than Woman.

Her beauty was as a dream, was as a song ;
the one dream of a lifetime dreamed on
enchanted dews, the one song sung to some
city by a deathless bird blown far from his
native coasts by storm in Paradise. Dawn
after dawn on mountains of romance or twi-
light after twilight could never equal her
beauty ; all the glow-worms had not the
secret among them nor all the stars of night ;
poets had never sung it nor evening guessed
its meaning ; the morning envied it, it was
hidden from lovers.

She was unwed, unwooed.

The lions came not to woo her because
they feared her strength, and the gods dared
not love her because they knew she must die.

This was what evening had whispered to
the bat, this was the dream in the heart of
Shepperalk as he cantered blind through the
mist. And suddenly there at his hooves in the
dark of the plain appeared the cleft in the
legendary lands, and Zretazoola sheltering in
the cleft, and sunning herself in the evening.

THE BOOK OF WONDER

Swiftly and craftily he bounded down by
the upper end of the cleft, and entering
Zretazoola by the outer gate which looks out
sheer on the stars, he galloped suddenly down
the narrow streets. Many that rushed out
on to balconies as he went clattering by, many
that put their heads from glittering windows,
are told of in olden song. Shepperalk did not
tarry to give greetings or to answer challenges
from martial towers, he was down through
the earthward gateway like the thunderbolt
of his sires, and, like Leviathan who has
leapt at an eagle, he surged into the water
between temple and tomb.

He galloped with half-shut eyes up the
temple-steps, and, only seeing dimly through
his lashes, seized Sombelene by the hair,
undazzled as yet by her beauty, and so haled
her away ; and, leaping with her over the
floorless chasm where the waters of the lake
fall unremembered away into a hole in the
world, took her we know not where, to be her
slave for all those centuries that are allowed
to his race.

Three blasts he gave as he went upon that
silver horn that is the world-old treasure of
the centaurs. These were his wedding bells.

THE OMINOUS COUGH

THE DISTRESSING TALE OF
THANGOBRIND THE JEWELLER

AND OF THE
DOOM THAT BEFELL HIM

WHEN Thangobrind the jeweller heard the
ominous cough, he turned at once upon that
narrow way. A thief was he, of very high
repute, being patronised by the lofty and elect,
for he stole nothing smaller than the Moomoo's
egg, and in all his life stole only four kinds
of stone — the ruby, the diamond, the emerald,
and the sapphire ; and, as jewellers go, his
honesty was great. Now there was a Merchant
Prince who had come to Thangobrind and
had offered his daughter's soul for the diamond
that is larger than the human head and was
to be found on the lap of the spider-idol, Hlo-
hlo, in his temple of Moung-ga-ling ; for he
had heard that Thangobrind was a thief to be
trusted.

Thangobrind oiled his body and slipped out
of his shop, and went secretly through byways,
and got as far as Snarp, before anybody knew

THE BOOK OF WONDER

that he was out on business again or missed
his sword from its place under the counter.
Thence he moved only by night, hiding by
day and rubbing the edges of his sword, which
he called Mouse because it was swift and
nimble. The jeweller had subtle methods
of travelling ; nobody saw him cross the
plains of Zid ; nobody saw him come to Mursk
or Tlun. O, but he loved shadows ! Once
the moon peeping out unexpectedly from a
tempest had betrayed an ordinary jeweller;
not so did it undo Thangobrind : the watch-
men only saw a crouching shape that snarled
and laughed : " Tis but a hyena/' they said.
Once in the city of Ag one of the guardians
seized him, but Thangobrind was oiled and
slipped from his hand ; you scarcely heard
his bare feet patter away. He knew that the
Merchant Prince awaited his return, his little
eyes open all night and glittering with greed ;
he knew how his daughter lay chained up and
screaming night and day. Ah, Thangobrind
knew. And had he not been out on business
he had almost allowed himself one or two
little laughs. But business was business, and
the diamond that he sought still lay on the
lap of Hlo-hlo, where it had been for the last
two million years since Hlo-hlo created the
world and gave unto it all things except that

THE TALE OF THANGOBRIND

precious stone called Dead Man's Diamond.
The jewel was often stolen, but it had a knack
of coming back again to the lap of Hlo-hlo.
Thangobrind knew this, but he was no com-
mon jeweller and hoped to outwit Hlo-hlo,
perceiving not the trend of ambition and lust
and that they are vanity.

How nimbly he threaded his way through
the pits of Snood ! — now like a botanist,
scrutinising the ground ; now like a dancer,
leaping from crumbling edges. It was quite
dark when he went by the towers of Tor,
where archers shoot ivory arrows at strangers
lest any foreigner should alter their laws, which
are bad, but not to be altered by mere aliens.
At night they shoot by the sound of the
stranger's feet. O, Thangobrind, Thangobrind,
was ever a jeweller like you ! He dragged two
stones behind him by long cords, and at these
the archers shot. Tempting indeed was the
snare that they set in Woth, the emeralds loose-
set in the city's gate ; but Thangobrind
discerned the golden cord that climbed the
wall from each and the weights that would
topple upon him if he touched one, and so he
left them, though he left them weeping, and
at last came to Theth. There all men worship
Hlo-hlo ; though they are willing to believe in
other gods, as missionaries attest, but only

THE BOOK OF WONDER

as creatures of the chase for the hunting of
Hlo-hlo, who wears Their halos, so these
people say, on golden hooks along his hunting-
belt. And from Theth he came to the city
of Moung and the temple of Moung-ga-ling,
and entered and saw the spider-idol, Hlo-hlo,
sitting there with Dead Man's Diamond
glittering on his lap, and looking for all the
world like a full moon, but a full moon seen
by a lunatic who had slept too long in its rays,
for there was in Dead Man's Diamond a certain
sinister look and a boding of things to happen
that are better not mentioned here. The face
of the spider-idol was lit by that fatal gem ;
there was no other light. In spite of his
shocking limbs and that demoniac body his
face was serene and apparently unconscious.
A little fear came into the mind of Thango-
brind the jeweller, a passing tremor — no more ;
business was business and he hoped for the
best. Thangobrind offered honey to Hlo-hlo
and prostrated himself before him. Oh, he
was cunning ! When the priests stole out of
the darkness to lap up the honey they were
stretched senseless on the temple floor, for
there was a drug in the honey that was offered
to Hlo-hlo. And Thangobrind the jeweller
picked Dead Man's Diamond up and put it
on his shoulder and trudged away from the

THE TALE OF THANGOBRIND

shrine ; and Hlo-hlo the spider-idol said
nothing at all, but he laughed softly as the
jeweller shut the door. When the priests
awoke out of the grip of the drug that was
offered with the honey to Hlo-hlo, they rushed
to a little secret room with an outlet on the
stars and cast a horoscope of the thief. Some-
thing that they saw in the horoscope seemed
to satisfy the priests.

It was not like Thangobrind to go back by
the road by which he had come. No, he went
by another road, even though it led to the
narrow way, night-house and spider-forest.

The city of Moung went towering up behind
him, balcony above balcony, eclipsing half the
stars, as he trudged away with his diamond.
He was not easy as he trudged away. Though
when a soft pittering as of velvet feet arose
behind him he refused to acknowledge that
it might be what he feared, yet the instincts
of his trade told him that it is not well when
any noise whatever follows a diamond by
night, and this was one of the largest that had
ever come to him in the way of business.
When he came to the narrow way that leads
to spider-forest, Dead Man's Diamond feeling
cold and heavy, and the velvety footfall
seeming fearfully close, the jeweller stopped
and almost hesitated. He looked behind him ;

THE BOOK OF WONDER

there was nothing there. He listened atten-
tively ; there was no sound now. Then he
thought of the screams of the Merchant
Prince's daughter, whose soul was the diamond's
price, and smiled and went stoutly on. There
watched him, apathetically, over the narrow
way, that grim and dubious woman whose
house is the Night. Thangobrind, hearing no
longer the sound of suspicious feet, felt easier
now. He was all but come to the end of the
narrow way, when the woman listlessly uttered
that ominous cough.

The cough was too full of meaning to be
disregarded. Thangobrind turned round and
saw at once what he feared. The spider-idol
had not stayed at home. The jeweller put
his diamond gently upon the ground and drew
his sword called Mouse. And then began that
famous fight upon the narrow way, in which
the grim old woman whose house was Night
seemed to take so little interest. To the
spider-idol you saw at once it was all a horrible
joke. To the jeweller it was grim earnest.
He fought and panted and was pushed back
slowly along the narrow way, but he wounded
Hlo-hlo all the while with terrible long gashes
all over his deep, soft body till Mouse was
slimy with blood. But at last the persistent
laughter of Hlo-hlo was too much for the

THE TALE OF THANGOBRIND

jeweller's nerves, and, once more wounding
his demoniac foe, he sank aghast and exhausted
by the door of the house called Night at the
feet of the grim old woman, who having uttered
once that ominous cough interfered no further
with the course of events. And there carried
Thangobrind the jeweller away those whose
duty it was, to the house where the two men
hang, and taking down from his hook the left-
hand one of the two, they put that venturous
jeweller in his place ; so that there fell on him
the doom that he feared, as all men know
though it is so long since, and there abated
somewhat the ire of the envious gods.

And the only daughter of the Merchant
Prince felt so little gratitude for this great
deliverance that she took to respectability of
a militant kind, and became aggressively dull,
and called her home the English Riviera, and
had platitudes worked in worsted upon her
tea-cosy, and in the end never died, but passed
away at her residence.

THE HOUSE OF THE SPHINX

WHEN I came to the House of the Sphinx it
was already dark. They made me eagerly
welcome. And I, in spite of the deed, was glad
of any shelter from that ominous wood. I
saw at once that there had been a deed,
although a cloak did all that a cloak may do to
conceal it. The mere uneasiness of the welcome
made me suspect that cloak.

The Sphinx was moody and silent. I had
not come to pry into the secrets of Eternity
nor to investigate the Sphinx's private life,
and so had little to say and few questions to
ask ; but to whatever I did say she remained
morosely indifferent. It was clear that either
she suspected me of being in search of the
secrets of one of her gods, or of being boldly
inquisitive about her traffic with Time, or
else she was darkly absorbed with brooding
upon the deed.

I saw soon enough that there was another
than me to welcome ; I saw it from the hurried
way that they glanced from the door to the

THE HOUSE OF THE SPHINX

deed and back to the door again. And it was
clear that the welcome was to be a bolted
door. But such bolts, and such a door ! Rust
and decay and fungus had been there far too
long, and it was not a barrier any longer that
would keep out even a determined wolf. And
it seemed to be something worse than a wolf
that they feared.

A little later on I gathered from what they
said that some imperious and ghastly thing
was looking for the Sphinx, and that some-
thing that had happened had made its arrival
certain. It appeared that they had slapped
the Sphinx to vex her out of her apathy in
order that she should pray to one of her gods,
whom she had littered in the house of Time ;
but her moody silence was invincible, and her
apathy Oriental, ever since the deed had
happened. And when they found that they
could not make her pray, there was nothing
for them to do but to pay little useless atten-
tions to the rusty lock of the door, and to look
at the deed and wonder, and even pretend to
hope, and to say that after all it might not
bring that destined thing from the forest,
which no one named.

It may be said I had chosen a gruesome
house, but not if I had described the forest
from which I came, and I was in need of any

c 17

THE BOOK OF WONDER

spot wherein I could rest my mind from the
thought of it.

I wondered very much what thing would
come from the forest on account of the deed ;
and having seen that forest — as you, gentle
reader, have not — I had the advantage of
knowing that anything might come. It was
useless to ask the Sphinx — she seldom reveals
things, like her paramour Time (the gods take
after her), and while this mood was on her,
rebuff was certain. So I quietly began to oil
the lock of the door. And as soon as they
saw this simple act I won their confidence.
It was not that my work was of any use — it
should have been done long before ; but they
saw that my interest was given for the moment
to the thing that they thought vital. They
clustered round me then. They asked me
what I thought of the door, and whether I
had seen better, and whether I had seen worse ;
and I told them about all the doors I knew,
and said that the doors of the baptistery in
Florence were better doors, and the doors
made by a certain firm of builders in London
were worse. And then I asked them what it
was that was coming after the Sphinx because
of the deed. And at first they would not say,
and I stopped oiling the door ; and then they
said that it was the arch-inquisitor of the

THE HOUSE OF THE SPHINX

forest, who is investigator and avenger of all
silvestrian things ; and from all that they
said about him it seemed to me that this
person was quite white, and was a kind of
madness that would settle down quite blankly
upon the place, a kind of mist in which reason
could not live ; and it was the fear of this that
made them fumble nervously at the lock of
that rotten door ; but with the Sphinx it was
not so much fear as sheer prophecy.

The hope that they tried to hope was well
enough in its way, but I did not share it ; it
was clear that the thing that they feared was
the corollary of the deed — one saw that more
by the resignation upon the face of the Sphinx
than by their sorry anxiety for the door.

The wind soughed, and the great tapers
flared, and their obvious fear and the silence
of the Sphinx grew more than ever a part of
the atmosphere, and bats went restlessly
through the gloom of the wind that beat the
tapers low.

Then a few things screamed far off, then a
little nearer, and something was coming
towards us, laughing hideously. I hastily
gave a prod to the door that they guarded ;
my finger sank right into the mouldering wood
—there was not a chance of holding it. I had
not leisure to observe their fright ; I thought

THE BOOK OF WONDER

of the back-door, for the forest was better
than this ; only the Sphinx was absolutely
calm, her prophecy was made and she seemed
to have seen her doom, so that no new thing
could perturb her.

But by mouldering rungs of ladders as old
as Man, by slippery edges of the dreaded abyss,
with an ominous dizziness about my heart
and a feeling of horror in the soles of my feet
I clambered from tower to tower till I found
the door that I sought ; and it opened on to
one of the upper branches of a huge and
sombre pine, down which I climbed on to the
floor of the forest. And I was glad to be back
again in the forest from which I had fled.

And the Sphinx in her menaced house — I
know not how she fared — whether she gazes
for ever, disconsolate, at the deed, remem-
bering only in her smitten mind, at which
little boys now leer, that she once knew well
those things at which Man stands aghast ; or
whether in the end she crept away, and
clambering horribly from abyss to abyss,
came at last to higher things, and is wise and
eternal still. For who knows of madness
whether it is divine or whether it be of the
pit?

THE PROBABLE ADVENTURE
OF THE THREE LITERARY MEN

WH£N the nomads came to El Lola they had
no more songs, and the question of stealing
the golden box arose in all its magnitude. On
the one hand, many had sought the golden
box, the receptacle (as the Aethiopians know)
of poems of fabulous value ; and their doom
is still the common talk of Arabia. On the
other hand, it was lonely to sit round the camp-
fire by night with no new songs.

It was the tribe of Heth that discussed
these things one evening upon the plains
below the peak of Mluna. Their native land
was the track across the world of immemorial
wanderers ; and there was trouble among the
elders of the nomads because there were no
new songs ; while, untouched by human
trouble, untouched as yet by the night that was
hiding the plains away, the peak of Mluna,
calm in the after-glow, looked on the Dubious
Land. And it was there on the plain upon the
known side of Mluna, just as the evening star

THE BOOK OF WONDER

came mouse-like into view and the flames of
the camp-fire lifted their lonely plumes un-
cheered by any song, that that rash scheme
was hastily planned by the nomads which the
world has named The Quest of the Golden
Box.

No measure of wiser precaution could the
elders of the nomads have taken than to
choose for their thief that very Slith, that
identical thief that (even as I write) in how
many school-rooms governesses teach stole a
march on the King of Westalia. Yet the
weight of the box was such that others had
to accompany him, and Sippy and Slorg were
no more agile thieves than may be found to-
day among vendors of the antique.

So over the shoulder of Mluna these three
climbed next day and slept as well as they
might among its snows rather than risk a
night in the woods of the Dubious Land. And
the morning came up radiant and the birds
were full of song, but the forest underneath
and the waste beyond it and the bare and
ominous crags all wore the appearance of an
unuttered threat.

Though Slith had an experience of twenty
years of theft, yet he said little ; only if one
of the others made a stone roll with his foot,
or, later on in the forest, if one of them stepped

THE THREE LITERARY MEN

on a twig, he whispered sharply to them
always the same words : " That is not busi-
ness." He knew that he could not make them
better thieves during a two days' journey,
and whatever doubts he had he interfered no
further.

From the shoulder of Mluna they dropped
into the clouds, and from the clouds to the
forest, to whose native beasts, as well the
three thieves knew, all flesh was meat, whether
it were the flesh of fish or man. There the
thieves drew idolatrously from their pockets
each one a separate god and prayed for pro-
tection in the unfortunate wood, and hoped
therefrom for a threefold chance of escape,
since if anything should eat one of them
it were certain to eat them all, and they
confided that the corollary might be true and
all should escape if one did. Whether one
of these gods was propitious and awake, or
whether all of the three, or whether it was
chance that brought them through the forest
unmouthed by detestable beasts, none knoweth ;
but certainly neither the emissaries of the
god that most they feared, nor the wrath
of the topical god of that ominous place,
brought their doom to the three adventurers
there or then. And so it was that they came
to Rumbly Heath, in the heart of the Dubious

THE BOOK OF WONDER

Land, whose stormy hillocks were the ground-
swell and the after-wash of the earthquake
lulled for a while. Something so huge that
it seemed unfair to man that it should
move so softly stalked splendidly by them,
and only so barely did they escape its notice
that one word rang and echoed through
their three imaginations — " If — if — if." And
when this danger was at last gone by they
moved cautiously on again and presently
saw the little harmless mipt, half fairy and
half gnome, giving shrill contented squeaks
on the edge of the world. And they edged
away unseen, for they said that the inquisi-
tiveness of the mipt had become fabulous,
and that, harmless as he was, he had' a bad
way with secrets ; yet they probably loathed
the way that he nuzzles dead white bones,
and would not admit their loathing, for it
does not become adventurers to care who eats
their bones. Be this as it may, they edged
away from the mipt, and came almost at once
to the wizened tree, the goalpost of their
adventure, and knew that beside them was
the crack in the World and the bridge from
Bad to Worse, and that underneath them
stood the rocky house of Owner of the Box.

This was their simple plan : to slip into
the corridor in the upper cliff ; to run softly

THE THREE LITERARY MEN

down it (of course with naked feet) under the
warning to travellers that is graven upon stone,
which interpreters take to be " It Is Better
Not " ; not to touch the berries that are there
for a purpose, on the right side going down ;
and so to come to the guardian on his pedestal
who had slept for a thousand years and should
be sleeping still ; and go in through the open
window. One man was to wait outside by
the crack in the World until the others came
out with the golden box, and, should they
cry for help, he was to threaten at once to
unfasten the iron clamp that kept the crack
together. When the box was secured they
were to travel all night and all the following
day, until the cloud-banks that wrapped the
slopes of Mluna were well between them and
Owner of the Box.

The door in the cliff was open. They passed
without a murmur down the cold steps, Slith
leading them all the way. A glance of longing,
no more, each gave to the beautiful berries.
The guardian upon his pedestal was still asleep.
Slorg climbed by a ladder, that Slith knew
where to find, to the iron clamp across the
crack in the World, and waited beside it with
a chisel in his hand, listening closely for any-
thing untoward, while his friends slipped
into the house ; and no sound came. And

THE BOOK OF WONDER

presently Slith and Sippy found the golden
box : everything seemed happening as they
had planned, it only remained to see if it was
the right one and to escape with it from that
dreadful place. Under the shelter of the
pedestal, so near to the guardian that they
could feel his warmth, which paradoxically
had the effect of chilling the blood of the
boldest of them, they smashed the emerald
hasp and opened the golden box ; and there
they read by the light of ingenious sparks
which Slith knew how to contrive, and even
this poor light they hid with their bodies.
What was their joy, even at that perilous
moment, as they lurked between the guardian
and the abyss, to find that the box contained
fifteen peerless odes in the alcaic form, five
sonnets that were by far the most beautiful
in the world, nine ballads in the manner of
Provence that had no equal in the treasuries
of man, a poem addressed to a moth in twenty-
eight perfect stanzas, a piece of blank verse
of over a hundred lines on a level not yet
known to have been attained by man, as well
as fifteen lyrics on which no merchant would
dare to set a price. They would have read
them again, for they gave happy tears to a
man and memories of dear things done in
infancy, and brought sweet voices from far

THE THREE LITERARY MEN

sepulchres ; but Slith pointed imperiously to
the way by which they had come, and ex-
tinguished the light ; and Slorg and Sippy
sighed, then took the box.

The guardian still slept the sleep that
survived a thousand years.

As they came away they saw that indulgent
chair close by the edge of the World in which
Owner of the Box had lately sat reading
selfishly and alone the most beautiful songs
and verses that poet ever dreamed.

They came in silence to the foot of the
stairs ; and then it befell that as they drew
near safety, in the night's most secret hour,
some hand in an upper chamber lit a shocking
light, lit it and made no sound.

For a moment it might have been an
ordinary light, fatal as even that could very
well be at such a moment as this ; but when
it began to follow them like an eye and to
grow redder and redder as it watched them,
then even optimism despaired.

And Sippy very unwisely attempted flight,
and Slorg even as unwisely tried to hide ; but
Slith, knowing well why that light was lit in
that secret upper chamber and who it was that
lit it, leaped over the edge of the World and
is falling from us still through the unrever-
berate blackness of the abyss.

THE INJUDICIOUS PRAYERS OF
POMBO THE IDOLATER

POMBO the idolater had prayed to Ammuz a
simple prayer, a necessary prayer, such as even
an idol of ivory could very easily grant, and
Ammuz had not immediately granted it.
Pombo had therefore prayed to Tharma for
the overthrow of Ammuz, an idol friendly to
Tharma, and in doing this offended against the
etiquette of the gods. Tharma refused to grant
the little prayer. Pombo prayed frantically to
all the gods of idolatry, for though it was a
simple matter, yet it was very necessary to a
man. And gods that were older than Ammuz
rejected the prayers of Pombo, and even gods
that were younger and therefore of greater
repute. He prayed to them one by one, and
they all refused to hear him ; nor at first did
he think at all of that subtle, divine etiquette
against which he had offended. It occurred
to him all at once as he prayed to his fiftieth
idol, a little green-jade god whom the Chinese
know, that all the idols were in league against

POMBO THE IDOLATER

him. When Pombo discovered this he re-
sented his birth bitterly, and made lamenta-
tions and alleged that he was lost. He might
have been seen in any part of London haunting
curiosity-shops and places where they sold
idols of ivory or of stone, for he dwelt in
London with others of his race though he was
born in Burmah among those who hold Ganges
holy. On drizzly evenings of November's
worst his haggard face could be seen in the
glow of some shop pressed close against the
glass, where he would supplicate some calm
cross-legged idol till policemen moved him on.
And after closing hours back he would go to
his dingy room, in that part of our capital
where English is seldom spoken, to supplicate
little idols of his own. And when Pombo's
simple, necessary prayer was equally refused
by the idols of museums, auction-rooms,
shops, then he took counsel with himself and
purchased incense and burned it in a brazier
before his own cheap little idols, and played
the while upon an instrument such as that
wherewith men charm snakes. And still the
idols clung to their etiquette.

Whether Pombo knew about this etiquette
and considered it frivolous in the face of his
need, or whether his need, now grown desperate,
unhinged his mind, I know not, but Pombo

THE BOOK OF WONDER

the idolater took a stick and suddenly turned
iconoclast.

Pombo the iconoclast immediately left his
house, leaving his idols to be swept away with
the dust and so to mingle with Man, and went
to an arch-idolater of repute who carved idols
out of rare stones, and put his case before him.
The arch-idolater who made idols of his own
rebuked Pombo in the name of Man for having
broken his idols — " for hath not Man made
them ? " the arch-idolater said ; and con-
cerning the idols themselves he spoke long
and learnedly, explaining divine etiquette, and
how Pombo had offended, and how no idol in
the world would listen to Pombo's prayer.
When Pombo heard this he wept and made
bitter outcry, and cursed the gods of ivory
and the gods of jade, and the hand of Man
that made them, but most of all he cursed
their etiquette that had undone, as he said,
an innocent man ; so that at last that arch-
idolater, who made idols of his own, stopped
in his work upon an idol of jasper for a king
that was weary of Wosh, and took compassion
on Pombo, and told him that though no idol
in the world would listen to his prayer, yet
only a little way over the edge of it a certain
disreputable idol sat who knew nothing of
etiquette, and granted prayers that no re-

POMBO THE IDOLATER

spectable god would ever consent to hear.
When Pombo heard this he took two handfuls
of the arch-idolater's beard and kissed them
joyfully, and dried his tears and became his
old impertinent self again. And he that
carved from jasper the usurper of Wosti ex-
plained how in the village of World's End,
at the furthest end of Last Street, there is a
hole that you take to be a well, close by the
garden wall, but that if you lower yourself by
your hands over the edge of the hole, and feel
about with your feet till they find a ledge, that
is the top step of a flight of stairs that takes
you down over the edge of the World. " For all
that men know, those stairs may have a purpose
and even a bottom step/' said the arch-
idolater, "but discussion about the lower
flights is idle." Then the teeth of Pombo
chattered, for he feared the darkness, but he that
made idols of his own explained that those stairs
were always lit by the faint blue gloaming
in which the World spins. " Then," he said,
" you will go by Lonely House and under the
bridge that leads from the House to Nowhere,
and whose purpose is not guessed ; thence
past Maharrion, the god of flowers, and his
high-priest, who is neither bird nor cat ; and
so you will come to the little idol Duth, the
disreputable god that will grant your prayer."

THE BOOK OF WONDER

And he went on carving again at his idol of
jasper for the king who was weary of Wosh ;
and Pombo thanked him and went singing
away, for in his vernacular mind he thought
that " he had the gods."

It is a long journey from London to World's
End, and Pombo had no money left, yet
within five weeks he was strolling along Last
Street ; but how he contrived to get there I
will not say, for it was not entirely honest.
And Pombo found the well at the end of the
garden beyond the end house of Last Street,
and many thoughts ran through his mind as he
hung by his hands from the edge, but chiefest
of all those thoughts was one that said the
gods were laughing at him through the mouth
of the arch-idolater, their prophet, and the
thought beat in his head till it ached like his
wrists . . . and then he found the step.

And Pombo walked downstairs. There,
sure enough, was the gloaming in which the
world spins, and stars shone far off in it
faintly ; there was nothing before him as he
went downstairs but that strange blue waste
of gloaming, with its multitudes of stars,
and comets plunging through it on outward
journeys, and comets returning home. And
then he saw the lights of the bridge to Nowhere,
and all of a sudden he was in the glare of the

POMBO THE IDOLATER

shimmering parlour-window of Lonely House ;
and he heard voices there pronouncing words,
and the voices were nowise human, and but
for his bitter need he had screamed and fled.
Halfway between the voices and Maharrion,
whom he now saw standing out from the world,
covered in rainbow halos, he perceived the
weird grey beast that is neither cat nor bird.
As Pombo hesitated, chilly with fear, he heard
those voices grow louder in Lonely House, and
at that he stealthily moved a few steps lower,
and then rushed past the beast. The beast
intently watched Maharrion hurling up bubbles
that are every one a season of spring in un-
known constellations, calling the swallows
home to unimagined fields, watched him with-
out even turning to look at Pombo, and saw
him drop into the Linlunlarna, the river that
rises at the edge of the World, the golden
pollen that sweetens the tide of the river and
is carried away from the World to be a joy to
the Stars. And there before Pombo was the
little disreputable god who cares nothing for
etiquette and will answer prayers that are
refused by all the respectable idols. And
whether the view of him, at last, excited
Pombo's eagerness, or whether his need was
greater than he could bear that it drove him
so swiftly downstairs, or whether, as is most

D 33

THE BOOK OF WONDER

likely, he ran too fast past the beast, I do not
know, and it does not matter to Pombo ; but
at any rate he could not stop, as he had
designed, in attitude of prayer at the feet of
Duth, but ran on past him down the narrowing
steps, clutching at smooth bare rocks till he fell
from the World as we, when our hearts miss a
beat, fall in dreams and wake up with a dreadful
jolt ; but there was no waking up for Pombo,
who still fell on towards the incurious stars,
and his fate is even one with the fate of Slith.

THE LOOT OF BOMBASHARNA

THINGS had grown too hot for Shard, captain
of pirates, on all the seas that he knew. The
ports of Spain were closed to him ; they knew
him in San Domingo ; men winked in Syracuse
when he went by ; the two Kings of the
Sicilies never smiled within an hour of speaking
of him ; there were huge rewards for his head
in every capital city, with pictures of it for
identification — and all the pictures were un-
flattering. Therefore Captain Shard decided
that the time had come to tell his men the
secret.

Riding off Teneriffe one night, he called
them together. He generously admitted that
there were things in the past that might
require explanation : the crowns that the
Princes of Aragon had sent to their nephews
the Kings of the two Americas had certainly
never reached their Most Sacred Majesties.
Where, men might ask, were the eyes of
Captain Stobbud ? Who had been burning
towns on the Patagonian seaboard ? Why

THE BOOK OF WONDER

should such a ship as theirs choose pearls for
cargo ? Why so much blood on the decks
and so many guns ? And where was the
Nancy, the Lark, or the Margaret Bell?
Srioh questions as these, he urged, might be
asked by the inquisitive, and if counsel for
the defence should happen to be a fool, and
unacquainted with the ways of the sea, they
might become involved in troublesome legal
formulae. And Bloody Bill, as they rudely
called Mr. Gagg, a member of the crew, looked
up at the sky, and said that it was a windy
night and looked like hanging. And some of
those present thoughtfully stroked their necks
while Captain Shard unfolded to them his
plan. He said the time was come to quit the
Desperate Lark, for she was too well known
to the navies of four kingdoms, and a fifth was
getting to know her, and others had suspicions.
(More cutters than even Captain Shard sus-
pected were already looking for her jolly black
flag with its neat skull-and-crossbones in
yellow.) There was a little archipelago that
he knew of on the wrong side of the Sargasso
Sea ; there were about thirty islands there,
bare, ordinary islands, but one of them floated.
He had noticed -it years ago, and had gone
ashore and never told a soul but had quietly
anchored it with the anchor of his ship to the

THE LOOT OF BOMBASHARNA

bottom of the sea, which just there was pro-
foundly deep, and had made the thing the
secret of his life, determined to marry and
settle down there if it ever became impossible
to earn his livelihood in the usual way at sea.
When first he saw it it was drifting slowly, with
the wind in the tops of the trees ; but if the
cable had not rusted away, it should be still
where he left it, and they would make a rudder
and hollow out cabins below, and at night
they would hoist sails to the trunks of the
trees and sail wherever they liked.

And all the pirates cheered, for they wanted
to set their feet on land again somewhere
where the hangman would not come and jerk
them off it at once ; and, bold men though
they were, it was a strain seeing so many lights
coming their way at night. Even then . . . !
But it swerved away again and was lost in the
mist.

And Captain Shard said that they would
need to get provisions first, and he, for one,
intended to marry before he settled down ;
and so they should have one more fight before
they left the ship, and sack the sea-coast city
Bombasharna and take from it provisions
for several years, while he himself would
marry the Queen of the South. And again
the pirates cheered, for often they had seen

THE BOOK OF WONDER

sea-coast Bombasharna, and had always envied
its opulence from the sea.

So they set all sail, and often altered their
course, and dodged and fled from strange
lights till dawn appeared, and all day long
fled southwards. And by evening they saw the
silver spires of slender Bombasharna, a city
that was the glory of the coast. And in the
midst of it, far away though they were, they
saw the palace of the Queen of the South ;
and it was so full of windows all looking
toward the sea, and they were so full of light,
both from the sunset that was fading upon
the water and from the candles that maids
were lighting one by one, that it looked far
off like a pearl, shimmering still in its haliotis
shell, still wet from the sea.

So Captain Shard and his pirates saw it, at
evening over the water, and thought of
rumours that said that Bombasharna was the
loveliest city of the coasts of the world, and
that its palace was lovelier even than Bom-
basharna ; but for the Queen of the South
rumour had no comparison. Then night came
down and hid the silver spires, and Shard
slipped on through the gathering darkness
until by midnight the piratic ship lay under
the seaward battlements.

And at the hour when sick men mostly die,

THE LOOT OF BOMBASHARNA

and sentries on lonely ramparts stand to their
arms, exactly half-an-hour before dawn, Shard,
with two rowing boats and half his crew, with
craftily muffled oars, landed below the battle-
ments. They were through the gateway of
the palace itself before the alarm was sounded,
and as soon as they heard the alarm Shard's
gunners at sea opened upon the town, and,
before the sleepy soldiery of Bombasharna
knew whether the danger was from the land
or the sea, Shard had successfully captured
the Queen of the South. They would have
looted all day that silver sea-coast city, but
there appeared with dawn suspicious topsails
just along the horizon. Therefore the captain
with his Queen went down to the shore at
once and hastily re-embarked and sailed away
with what loot they had hurriedly got, and
with fewer men, for they had to fight a good
deal to get back to the boat. They cursed all
day the interference of those ominous ships
which steadily grew nearer. There were six
ships at first, and that night they slipped
away from all but two ; but all the next day
those two were still in sight, and each of them
had more guns than the Desperate Lark. All
the next night Shard dodged about the sea,
but the two ships separated and one kept him
in sight, and the next morning it was alone

THE BOOK OF WONDER

with Shard on the sea, and his archipelago
was just in sight, the secret of his life.

And Shard saw he must fight, and a bad
fight it was, and yet it suited Shard's purpose,
for he had more merry men when the fight
began than he needed for his island. And they
got it over before any other ship came up ;
and Shard put all adverse evidence out of the
way, and came that night to the islands near
the Sargasso Sea.

Long before it was light the survivors of the
crew were peering at the sea, and when dawn
came there was the island, no bigger than two
ships, straining hard at its anchor, with the
wind in the tops of the trees.

And then they landed and dug cabins below
and raised the anchor out of the deep sea, and
soon they made the island what they called
shipshape. But the Desperate Lark they sent
away empty under full sail to sea, where more
nations than Shard suspected were watching
for her, and where she was presently captured
by an admiral of Spain, who, when he found
none of that famous crew on board to hang by
the neck from the yard-arm, grew ill through
disappointment .

And Shard on his island offered the Queen
of the South the choicest of the old wines of
Provence, and for adornment gave her Indian

THE LOOT OF BOMBASHARNA

jewels looted from galleons with treasure for
Madrid, and spread a table where she dined in
the sun, while in some cabin below he bade the
least coarse of his mariners sing ; yet always
she was morose and moody towards him, and
often at evening he was heard to say that he
wished he knew more about the ways of
Queens. So they lived for years, the pirates
mostly gambling and drinking below, Captain
Shard trying to please the Queen of the South,
and she never wholly forgetting Bombasharna.
When they needed new provisions they hoisted
sails on the trees, and as long as no ship came
in sight they scudded before the wind, with the
water rippling over the beach of the island ;
but as soon as they sighted a ship the sails
came down, and they became an ordinary
uncharted rock.

They mostly moved by night ; sometimes
they hovered off sea-coast towns as of old,
sometimes they boldly entered river-mouths,
and even attached themselves for a while to
the mainland, whence they would plunder the
neighbourhood and escape again to sea. And
if a ship was wrecked on their island of a night
they said it was all to the good. They grew
very crafty in seamanship, and cunning in
what they did, for they knew that any news
of the Desperate Lark's old crew would bring

THE BOOK OF WONDER

hangmen from the interior running down to
every port.

And no one is known to have found them out
or to have annexed their island ; but a rumour
arose and passed from port to port and every
place where sailors meet together, and even
survives to this day, of a dangerous uncharted
rock anywhere between Plymouth and the
Horn, which would suddenly rise in the safest
track of ships, and upon which vessels were
supposed to have been wrecked, leaving,
strangely enough, no evidence of their doom.
There was a little speculation about it at first,
till it was silenced by the chance remark of a
man old with wandering ; " It is one of the
mysteries that haunt the sea."

And almost Captain Shard and the Queen of
the South lived happily ever after, though still
at evening those on watch in the trees would
see their captain sit with a puzzled air or hear
him muttering now and again in a discontented
way : "I wish I knew more about the ways of
Queens."

"I WISH I KNEW MORE ABOUT THE WAYS OF QUEENS

MISS CUBBIDGE AND THE
DRAGON OF ROMANCE

This tale is told in the balconies of Belgrave
Square and among the towers of Pont Street ;
men sing it at evening in the Brompton Road.

LITTLE upon her eighteenth birthday thought
Miss Cubbidge, of Number I2A Prince of
Wales' Square, that before another year had
gone its way she would lose the sight of that
unshapely oblong that was so long her home.
And, had you told her further that within
that year all trace of that so-called square,
and of the day when her father was elected
by a thumping majority to share in the
guidance of the destinies of the empire, should
utterly fade from her memory, she would merely
have said in that affected voice of hers, " Go
to!"

There was nothing about it in the daily
Press, the policy of her father's party had no
provision for it, there was no hint of it in
conversation at evening parties to which Miss

THE BOOK OF WONDER

Cubbidge went : there was nothing to warn
her at all that a loathsome dragon with golden
scales that rattled as he went should have
come up clean out of the prime of romance and
gone by night (so far as we know) through
Hammersmith, and come to Ardle Mansions,
and then have turned to his left, which of course
brought him to Miss Cubbidge's father's house.
There sat Miss Cubbidge at evening on her
balcony quite alone, waiting for her father to
be made a baronet. She was wearing walking-
boots and a hat and a low-necked evening
dress ; for a painter was but just now painting
her portrait and neither she nor the painter
saw anything odd in the strange combination.
She did not notice the roar of the dragon's
golden scales, nor distinguish above the mani-
fold lights of London the small, red glare of
his eyes. He suddenly lifted his head, a blaze
of gold, over the balcony ; he did not appear a
yellow dragon then, for his glistening scales
reflected the beauty that London puts upon her
only at evening and night. She screamed, but
to no knight, nor knew what knight to call on,
nor guessed where were the dragons' over-
throwers of far, romantic days, nor what
mightier game they chased or what wars they
waged ; perchance they were busy even then
arming for Armageddon.

MISS CUBBIDGE AND THE DRAGON

Out of the balcony of her father's house in
Prince of Wales' Square, the painted dark-
green balcony that grew blacker every year,
the dragon lifted Miss Cubbidge and spread his
rattling wings, and London fell away like an
old fashion. And England fell away, and the
smoke of its factories, and the round material
world that goes humming round the sun vexed
and pursued by Time, until there appeared the
eternal and ancient lands of Romance lying
low by mystical seas.

You had not pictured Miss Cubbidge stroking
the golden head of one of the dragons of song
with one hand idly, while with the other she
sometimes played with pearls brought up from
lonely places of the sea. They filled huge
haliotis shells with pearls and laid them there
beside her, they brought her emeralds which
she set to flash among the tresses of her long
black hair, they brought her threaded sapphires
for her cloak : all this the princes of fable did
and the elves and the gnomes of myth. And
partly she still lived, and partly she was one
with long-ago and with those sacred tales that
nurses tell, when all their children are good,
and evening has come, and the fire is burning
well, and the soft pat-pat of the snow-flakes
on the pane is like the furtive tread of fearful
things in old, enchanted woods. If at first she

THE BOOK OF WONDER

missed those dainty novelties among which she
was reared, the old, sufficient song of the
mystical sea singing of faery lore at first
soothed and at last consoled her. Even, she
forgot those advertisements of pills that are
so dear to England ; even, she forgot political
cant and the things that one discusses and the
things that one does not, and had perforce to
content herself with seeing sailing by huge
golden-laden galleons with treasure for Madrid,
and the merry skull-and-crossbones of the
pirateers, and the tiny nautilus setting out to
sea, and ships of heroes trafficking in romance
or of princes seeking for enchanted isles.

It was not by chains that the dragon kept
her there, but by one of the spells of old. To
one to whom the facilities of the daily Press
had for so long been accorded spells would have
palled — you would have said — and galleons
after a time and all things out-of-date.
After a time. But whether the centuries passed
her or whether the years or whether no time
at all, she did not know. If anything indicated
the passing of time it was the rhythm of elfin
horns blowing upon the heights. If the
centuries went by her the spell that bound her
gave her also perennial youth, and kept alight
for ever the lantern by her side, and saved
from decay the marble palace facing the

MISS CUBBIDGE AND THE DRAGON

mystical sea. And if no time went by her
there at all, her single moment on those
marvellous coasts was turned as it were to a
crystal reflecting a thousand scenes. If it
was all a dream, it was a dream that knew no
morning and no fading away. The tide roamed
on and whispered of mystery and of myth,
while near that captive lady, asleep in his
marble tank the golden dragon dreamed :
and a little way out from the coast all that
the dragon dreamed showed faintly in the
mist that lay over the sea. He never dreamed
of any rescuing knight. So long as he dreamed,
it was twilight ; but when he came up nimbly
out of his tank night fell and starlight glistened
on the dripping, golden scales.

There he and his captive either defeated
Time or never encountered him at all ; while,
in the world we know, raged Roncesvalles or
battles yet to be — I know not to what part of
the shore of Romance he bore her. Perhaps
she became one of those princesses of whom
fable loves to tell, but let it suffice that there
she lived by the sea : and kings ruled, and
Demos ruled, and kings came again, and many
cities returned to their native dust, and still
she abided there, and still her marble palace
passed not away nor the power that there was
in the dragon's spell.

THE BOOK OF WONDER

And only once did there ever come to her a
message from the world that of old she knew,
it came in a pearly ship across the mystical
sea, it was from an old school-friend that she
had had in Putney, merely a note, no more,
in a little, neat, round hand : it said, " It is
not Proper for you to be there alone/'

THE QUEST OF THE QUEEN'S
TEARS

SYLVIA, Queen of the Woods, in her wood-
land palace, held court, and made a mockery
of her suitors. She would sing to them, she
said, she would give them banquets, she would
tell them tales of legendary days, her jugglers
should caper before them, her armies salute
them, her fools crack jests with them and make
whimsical quips, only she could not love them.

This was not the way, they said, to treat
princes in their splendour and mysterious
troubadours concealing kingly names ; it was
not in accordance with fable ; myth had no
precedent for it. She should have thrown her
glove, they said, into some lion's den, she should
have asked for a score of venomous heads of
the serpents of Licantara, or demanded the
death of any notable dragon, or sent them all
upon some deadly quest, but that she could

not love them ! It was unheard of — it had

no parallel in the annals of romance.

And then she said that if they must needs

E 49

THE BOOK OF WONDER

have a quest she would offer her hand to him
who first should move her to tears : and the
quest should be called, for reference in histories
or song, the Quest of the Queen's Tears, and
he that achieved them she would wed, be he
only a petty duke of lands unknown to romance.

And many were moved to anger, for they
hoped for some bloody quest ; but the old
lords chamberlain said, as they muttered
among themselves in a far, dark end of the
chamber, that the quest was hard and wise,
for that if she could ever weep she might also
love. They had known her all her childhood ;
she had never sighed. Many men had she seen
suitors and courtiers, and had never turned
her head after one went by. Her beauty
was as still sunsets of bitter evenings when
all the world is frore, a wonder and a chill.
She was as a sun-stricken mountain uplifted
alone, all beautiful with ice, a desolate and
lonely radiance late at evening far up beyond
the comfortable world, not quite to be com-
panioned by the stars, the doom of the
mountaineer.

If she could weep, they said, she could love,
they said.

And she smiled pleasantly on those ardent
princes, and troubadours concealing kingly
names.

QUEST OF THE QUEEN'S TEARS

Then one by one they told, each suitor prince
the story of his love, with outstretched hands
and kneeling on the knee ; and very sorry and
pitiful were the tales, so that often up in the
galleries some maid of the palace wept. And
very graciously she nodded her head like a
listless magnolia in the deeps of the night
moving idly to all the breezes its glorious
bloom.

And when the princes had told their desperate
loves and had departed away with no other*
spoil than of their own tears only, even then
there came the unknown troubadours and
told their tales in song, concealing their gracious
names.

And one there was, Ackronnion, clothed
with rags, on which was the dust of roads,
and underneath the rags was war-scarred
armour whereon were the dints of blows ; and
when he stroked his harp and sang his song,
in gallery above gallery maidens wept, and
even the old lords chamberlain whimpered
among themselves and thereafter laughed
through their tears and said : " It is easy to
make old people weep and to bring idle tears
from lazy girls ; but he will not set a-weeping
the Queen of the Woods."

And graciously she nodded, and he was the
last. And disconsolate went away those dukes

THE BOOK OF WONDER

and princes, and troubadours in disguise. Yet
Ackronnion pondered as he went away.

King was he of Afarmah, Lool and Haf,
over-lord of Zeroora and hilly Chang, and
duke of the dukedoms of Molong and Mlash,
none of them unfamiliar with romance or
unknown or overlooked in the making of myth.
He pondered as he went in his thin disguise.

Now by those that do not remember their
childhood, having other things to do, be it
understood that underneath fairyland, which
is, as all men know, at the edge of the
world, there dwelleth the Gladsome Beast. A
synonym he for joy.

It is known how the lark in its zenith,
children at play out-of-doors, good witches
and jolly old parents have all been compared
— and how aptly ! — with this very same
Gladsome Beast. Only one " crab " he has
(if I may use slang for a moment to make
myself perfectly clear), only one drawback,
and that is that in the gladness of his heart
he spoils the cabbages of the Old Man Who
Looks After Fairyland, — and of course he eats
men.

It must further be understood that whoever
may obtain the tears of the Gladsome Beast
in a bowl, and become drunken upon them,
may move all persons to shed tears of joy so

QUEST OF THE QUEEN'S TEARS

long as he remains inspired by the potion to
sing or to make music.

Now Ackronnion pondered in this wise :
that if he could obtain the tears of the Glad-
some Beast by means of his art, withholding
him from violence by the spell of music, and
if a friend should slay the Gladsome Beast
before his weeping ceased — for an end must
come to weeping even with men — that so he
might get safe away with the tears, and drink
them before the Queen of the Woods and move
her to tears of joy. He sought out therefore
a humble, knightly man who cared not for the
beauty of Sylvia, Queen of the Woods, but
had found a woodland maiden of his own once
long ago in summer. And the man's name was
Arrath, a subject of Ackronnion, a knight-at-
arms of the spear-guard : and together they
set out through the fields of fable until they
came to Fairyland, a kingdom sunning itself
(as all men know) for leagues along the edges
of the world. And by a strange old pathway
they came to the land they sought, through
a wind blowing up the pathway sheer from
space with a kind of metallic taste from the
roving stars. Even so they came to the
windy house of thatch where dwells the Old
Man Who Looks After Fairyland sitting by
parlour windows that look away from the

THE BOOK OF WONDER

world. He made them welcome in his star-
ward parlour, telling them tales of Space, and
when they named to him their perilous quest
he said it would be a charity to kill the Glad-
some Beast ; for he was clearly one of those
that liked not its happy ways. And then he
took them out through his back door, for the
front door had no pathway nor even a step —
from it the old man used to empty his slops
sheer on to the Southern Cross — and so they
came to the garden wherein his cabbages were,
and those flowers that only blow in Fairyland,
turning their faces always towards the comet,
and he pointed them out the way to the place
he called Underneath, where the Gladsome
Beast had his lair. Then they manoeuvred.
Ackronnion was to go by the way of the steps
with his harp and an agate bowl, while Arrath
went round by a crag on the other side. Then
the Old Man Who Looks After Fairyland
went back to his windy house, muttering
angrily as he passed his cabbages, for he did
not love the ways of the Gladsome Beast ;
and the two friends parted on their separate
ways.

Nothing perceived them but that ominous
crow glutted overlong already upon the flesh
of man.

The wind blew bleak from the stars.

QUEST OF THE QUEEN'S TEARS

At first there was dangerous climbing, and
then Ackronnion gained the smooth broad
steps that led from the edge to the lair, and
at that moment heard at the top of the steps
the continuous chuckles of the Gladsome
Beast.

He feared then that its mirth might be in-
superable, not to be saddened by the most
grievous song ; nevertheless he did not turn
back then, but softly climbed the stairs and,
placing the agate bowl upon a step, struck up
the chaunt called Dolorous. It told of desolate,
regretted things befallen happy cities long
since in the prime of the world. It told of how
the gods and beasts and men had long ago
loved beautiful companions, and long ago in
vain. It told of the golden host of happy
hopes, but not of their achieving. It told how
Love scorned Death, but told of Death's
laughter. The contented chuckles of the
Gladsome Beast suddenly ceased in his lair.
He rose and shook himself. He was still un-
happy. Ackronnion still sang on the chaunt
called Dolorous. The Gladsome Beast came
mournfully up to him. Ackronnion ceased
not for the sake of his panic but still sang on.
He sang of the malignity of Time. Two tears
welled large in the eyes of the Gladsome
Beast. Ackronnion moved the agate bowl to

THE BOOK OF WONDER

a suitable spot with his foot. He sang of
autumn and of passing away. Then the beast
wept as the frore hills weep in the thaw, and
the tears splashed big into the agate bowl.
Ackronnion desperately chaunted on ; he told
of the glad unnoticed things men see and do
not see again, of sunlight beheld unheeded on
faces now withered away. The bowl was full.
Ackronnion was desperate : the Beast was so
close. Once he thought that its mouth was
watering ! — but it was only the tears that had
run on the lips of the Beast. He felt as a
morsel ! The Beast was ceasing to weep ! He
sang of worlds that had disappointed the gods.
And all of a sudden, crash ! an£ the staunch
spear of Arrath went home behind the shoulder,
and the tears and the joyful ways of the Glad-
some Beast were ended and over for ever.

And carefully they carried the bowl of tears
away, leaving the body of the Gladsome Beast
as a change of diet for the ominous crow ; and
going by the windy house of thatch they said
farewell to the Old Man Who Looks After
Fairyland, who when he heard of the deed
rubbed his large hands together and mumbled
again and again, " And a very good thing, too.
My cabbages ! My cabbages ! "

And not long after Ackronnion sang again
in the sylvan palace of the Queen of the

HE FELT AS A MORSEL

QUEST OF THE QUEEN'S TEARS

Woods, having first drunk all the tears in his
agate bowl. And it was a gala night, and all
the court were there and ambassadors from
the lands of legend and myth, and even from
Terra Cognita.

And Ackronnion sang as he never sang
before, and will not sing again. O, but dolorous,
dolorous, are all the ways of man, few and
fierce are his days, and the end trouble, and
vain, vain his endeavour : and woman — who
shall tell of it ? — her doom is written with
man's by listless, careless gods with their faces
to other spheres.

Somewhat thus he began, and then inspira-
tion seized him, and all the trouble in the
beauty of his song may not be set down by me :
there was much gladness in it, and all mingled
with grief : it was like the way of man : it was
like our destiny.

Sobs arose at his songs, sighs came back
along echoes : seneschals, soldiers, sobbed,
and a clear cry made the maidens ; like rain
the tears came down from gallery to gallery.

All round the Queen of the Woods was a
storm of sobbing and sorrow.

But no, she would not weep.

THE HOARD OF THE GIBBELINS

THE Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing
less good than man. Their evil tower is joined
to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a
bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason ; avarice
has no use for it ; they have a separate
cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for
sapphires ; they have filled a hole with gold
and dig it up when they need it. And the only
use that is known for their ridiculous wealth
is to attract to their larder a continual supply
of food. In times of famine they have even
been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little
trail of them to some city of Man, and sure
enough their larders would soon be full
again.

Their tower stands on the other side of that
river known to Homer — 6 /oo'o? axeavoto, as he
called it — which surrounds the world. And as
the river is narrow and fordable the tower was
built by the Gibbelins' gluttonous sires, for
they liked to see burglars rowing easily to their
steps. Some nourishment that common soil

THERE THE GIBBELINS LIVED AND DISCREDITABLY FED

THE HOARD OF THE GIBBELINS

has not the huge trees drained there with
their colossal roots from both banks of the
river.

There the Gibbelins lived and discreditably
fed.

Alderic, Knight of the Order of the City and
the Assault, hereditary Guardian of the King's
Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered
among the makers of myth, pondered so long
upon the Gibbelins' hoard that by now he
deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so
perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night
by a valorous man, that its motive was sheer
avarice ! Yet upon avarice only the Gibbelins
relied to keep their larders full, and once in
every hundred years sent spies into the cities
of men to see how avarice did, and always the
spies returned again to the tower saying that
all was well.

It may be thought that, as the years went
on and men came by fearful ends on that
tower's wall, fewer and fewer would come to the
Gibbelins' table : but the Gibbelins found
otherwise.

Not in the folly and frivolity of his youth
did Alderic come to the tower, but he studied
carefully for several years the manner in which
burglars met their doom when they went in

THE BOOK OF WONDER

search of the treasure that he considered his.
In every case they had entered by the door.

He consulted those who gave advice on this
quest ; he noted every detail and cheerfully
paid their fees, and determined to do nothing
that they advised, for what were their clients
now ? No more than examples of the savoury
art, mere half-forgotten memories of a meal;
and many, perhaps, no longer even that.

These were the requisites for the quest that
these men used to advise : a horse, a boat,
mail armour, and at least three men-at-arms.
Some said, " Blow the horn at the tower door ; "
others said, " Do not touch it."

Alderic thus decided : he would take no
horse down to the river's edge, he would not
row along it in a boat, and he would go alone
and by way of the Forest Unpassable.

How pass, you may say, by the unpassable ?
This was his plan : there was a dragon he knew
of who if peasants' prayers are heeded deserved
to die, not alone because of the number of
maidens he cruelly slew, but because he was
bad for the crops ; he ravaged the very land
and was the bane of a dukedom.

Now Alderic determined to go up against
him. So he took horse and spear and pricked
till he met the dragon, and the dragon came
out against him breathing bitter smoke. And

THE HOARD OF THE GIBBELINS

to him Alderic shouted, " Hath foul dragon
ever slain true knight ? " And well the dragon
knew that this had never been, and he hung
his head and was silent, for he was glutted
with blood. "Then/* said the knight, "if
thou wouldst ever taste maidens' blood again
thou shalt be my trusty steed, and if not, by
this spear there shall befall thee all that the
troubadours tell of the dooms of thy breed."

And the dragon did not open his ravening
mouth, nor rush upon the knight, breathing
out fire ; for well he knew the fate of those
that did these things, but he consented to the
terms imposed, and swore to the knight to
become his trusty steed.

It was on a saddle upon this dragon's back
that Alderic afterwards sailed above the un-
passable forest, even above the tops of those
measureless trees, children of wonder. But
first he pondered that subtle plan of his which
was more profound than merely to avoid all
that had been done before ; and he commanded
a blacksmith, and the blacksmith made him a
pickaxe.

Now there was great rejoicing at the rumour
of Alderic's quest, for all folk knew that he
was a cautious man, and they deemed that he
would succeed and enrich the world, and they
rubbed their hands in the cities at the thought

THE BOOK OF WONDER

of largesse ; and there was joy among all men
in Alderic's country, except perchance among
the lenders of money, who feared they would
soon be paid. And there was rejoicing also
because men hoped that when the Gibbelins
were robbed of their hoard, they would shatter
their high-built bridge and break the golden
chains that bound them to the world, and
drift back, they and their tower, to the moon,
from which they had come and to which they
rightly belonged. There was little love for the
Gibbelins, though all men envied their hoard.

So they all cheered, that day when he
mounted his dragon, as though he was already
a conqueror, and what pleased them more
than the good that they hoped he would do to
the world was that he scattered gold as he rode
away ; for he would not need it, he said, if
he found the Gibbelins' hoard, and he would
not need it more if he smoked on the Gibbelins'
table.

When they heard that he had rejected the
advice of those that gave it, some said that
the knight was mad, and others said he was
greater than those that gave the advice, but
none appreciated the worth of his plan.

He reasoned thus : for centuries men had
been well advised and had gone by the cleverest
way, while the Gibbelins came to expect them

THE HOARD OF THE GIBBELINS

to come by boat and to look for them at
the door whenever their larder was empty,
even as a man looketh for a snipe in the marsh ;
but how, said Alderic, if a snipe should sit in
the top of a tree, and would men find him
there ? Assuredly never ! So Alderic decided
to swim the river and not to go by the door,
but to pick his way into the tower through
the stone. Moreover, it was in his mind to
work below the level of the ocean, the river (as
Homer knew) that girdles the world, so that as
soon as he made a hole in the wall the water
should pour in, confounding the Gibbelins,
and flooding the cellars rumoured to be twenty
feet in depth, and therein he would dive for
emeralds as a diver dives for pearls.

And on the day that I tell of he galloped
away from his home scattering largesse of gold,
as I have said, and passed through many
kingdoms, the dragon snapping at maidens as
he went, but being unable to eat them because
of the bit in his mouth, and earning no gentler
reward than a spur-thrust where he was softest.
And so they came to the swart arboreal
precipice of the unpassable forest. The dragon
rose at it with a rattle of wings. Many a
farmer near the edge of the world saw him up
there where yet the twilight lingered, a faint,
black, wavering line ; and mistaking him for

THE BOOK OF WONDER

a row of geese going inland from the ocean,
went into their houses cheerily rubbing their
hands and saying that winter was coming,
and that we should soon have snow. Soon even
there the twilight faded away, and when they
descended at the edge of the world it was night
and the moon was shining. Ocean, the ancient
river, narrow and shallow there, flowed by
and made no murmur. Whether the Gibbelins
banqueted or whether they watched by the
door, they also made no murmur. And Alderic
dismounted and took his armour off, and
saying one prayer to his lady, swam with his
pickaxe. He did not part from his sword, for
fear that he met with a Gibbelin. Landed the
other side, he began to work at once, and all
went well with him. Nothing put out its head
from any window, and all were lighted so that
nothing within could see him in the dark. The
blows of his pickaxe were dulled in the deep
walls. All night he worked, no sound came
to molest him, and at dawn the last rock
swerved and tumbled inwards, and the river
poured in after. Then Alderic took a stone,
and went to the bottom step, and hurled the
stone at the door ; he heard the echoes roll
into the tower, then he ran back and dived
through the hole in the wall.

He was in the emerald-cellar. There was no

THE HOARD OF THE GIBBELINS

light in the lofty vault above him, but, diving
through twenty feet of water, he felt the floor
all rough with emeralds, and open coffers
full of them. By a faint ray of the moon he
saw that the water was green with them, and,
easily filling a satchel, he rose again to the
surface ; and there were the Gibbelins waist-
deep in the water, with torches in their hands !
And, without saying a word, or even smiling,
they neatly hanged him on the outer wall —
and the tale is one of those that have not a
happy ending.

HOW NUTH WOULD HAVE

PRACTISED HIS ART UPON

THE GNOLES

DESPITE the advertisements of rival firms, it
is probable that every tradesman knows that
nobody in business at the present time has a
position e^qual to that of Mr. Nuth. To those
outside the magic circle of business, his name
is scarcely known ; he does not need to adver-
tise, he is consummate. He is superior even to
modern competition, and, whatever claims
they boast, his rivals know it. His terms are
moderate, so much cash down when the goods
are delivered, so much in blackmail afterwards.
He consults your convenience. His skill may
be counted upon ; I have seen a shadow on a
windy night move more noisily than Nuth, for
Nuth is a burglar by trade. Men have been
known to stay in country houses and to send
a dealer afterwards to bargain for a piece of
tapestry that they saw there — some article
of furniture, some picture. This is bad taste :
but those whose culture is more elegant

NUTH AND THE GNOLES

invariably send Nuth a night or two after their
visit. He has a way with tapestry, you would
scarcely notice that the edges had been cut.
And often when I see some huge, new house
full of old furniture and portraits from other
ages, I say to myself, " These mouldering
chairs, these full-length ancestors and carved
mahogany are the produce of the incomparable
Nuth."

It may be urged against my use of the word
incomparable that in the burglary business the
name of Slith stands paramount and alone ;
and of this I am not ignorant ; but Slith is a
classic, and lived long ago, and knew nothing
at all of modern competition ; besides which
the surprising nature of his doom has possibly
cast a glamour upon Slith that exaggerates
in our eyes his undoubted merits.

It must not be thought that I am any friend
of Nuth's, on the contrary such politics as I
have are on the side of Property ; and he needs
no words from me, for his position is almost
unique in trade, being among the very few that
do not need to advertise.

At the time that my story begins Nuth lived
in a roomy house in Belgrave Square : in his
inimitable way he had made friends with the
caretaker. The place suited Nuth, and, when-
ever anyone came to inspect it before purchase,

THE BOOK OF WONDER

the caretaker used to praise the house in the
words that Nuth had suggested. " If it wasn't
for the drains," she would say, " it's the finest
house in London," and when they pounced
on this remark and asked questions about the
drains, she would answer them that the drains
also were good, but not so good as the house.
They did not see Nuth when they went over
the rooms, but Nuth was there.

Here in a neat black dress on one spring
morning came an old woman whose bonnet
was lined with red, asking for Mr. Nuth ; and
with her came her large and awkward son.
Mrs. Eggins, the caretaker, glanced up the
street, and then she let them in, and left them
to wait in the drawing-room amongst furniture
all mysterious with sheets. For a long while
they waited, and then there was a smell of pipe-
tobacco, and there was Nuth standing quite
close to them.

" Lord," said the old woman whose bonnet
was lined with red, " you did make me start."
And then she saw by his eyes that that was not
the way to speak to Mr. Nuth.

And at last Nuth spoke, and very nervously
the old woman explained that her son was a
likely lad, and had been in business already but
wanted to better himself, and she wanted
Mr. Nuth to teach him a livelihood.

NUTH AND THE GNOLES

First of all Nuth wanted to see a business
reference, and when he was shown one from
a jeweller with whom he happened to be hand-
in-glove the upshot of it was that he agreed to
take young Tonker (for this was the surname
of the likely lad) and to make him his appren-
tice. And the old woman whose bonnet was
lined with red went back to her little cottage
in the country, and every evening said to her
old man, " Tonker, we must fasten the shutters
of a night-time, for Tommy's a burglar now."

The details of the likely lad's apprentice-
ship I do not propose to give ; for those that
are in the business know those details already,
and those that are in other businesses care only
for their own, while men of leisure who have
no trade at all would fail to appreciate the
gradual degrees by which Tommy Tonker came
first to cross bare boards, covered with little
obstacles in the dark, without making any
sound, and then to go silently up creaky
stairs, and then to open doors, and lastly to
climb.

Let it suffice that the business prospered
greatly, while glowing reports of Tommy
Tonker's progress were sent from time to time
to the old woman whose bonnet was lined with
red in the laborious handwriting of Nuth.
Nuth had given up lessons in writing very

THE BOOK OF WONDER

early, for he seemed to have some prejudice
against forgery, and therefore considered
writing a waste of time. And then there came
the transaction with Lord Castlenorman at
his Surrey residence. Nuth selected a Saturday
night, for it chanced that Saturday was
observed as Sabbath in the family of Lord
Castlenorman, and by eleven o'clock the whole
house was quiet. Five minutes before mid-
night Tommy Tonker, instructed by Mr. Nuth,
who waited outside, came away with one
pocketful of rings and shirt-studs. It was
quite a light pocketful, but the jewellers in
Paris could not match it without sending
specially to Africa, so that Lord Castlenorman
had to borrow bone shirt-studs.

Not even rumour whispered the name of
Nuth. Were I to say that this turned his head,
there are those to whom the assertion would
give pain, for his associates hold that his astute
judgment was unaffected by circumstance.
I will say, therefore, that it spurred his genius
to plan what no burglar had ever planned before.
It was nothing less than to burgle the house
of the gnoles. And this that abstemious man
unfolded to Tonker over a cup of tea. Had
Tonker not been nearly insane with pride
over their recent transaction, and had he not
been blinded by a veneration for Nuth, he

NUTH AND THE GNOLES

would have — but I cry over spilt milk. He
expostulated respectfully : he said he would
rather not go ; he said it was not fair, he
himself to argue ; and in the end, one windy
October morning with a menace in the air
found him and Nuth drawing near to the
dreadful wood.

Nuth, by weighing little emeralds against
pieces of common rock, had ascertained the
probable weight of those house-ornaments
that the gnoles are believed to possess in the
narrow, lofty house wherein they have dwelt
from of old. They decided to steal two
emeralds and to carry them between them
on a cloak ; but if they should be too heavy
one must be dropped at once. Nuth warned
young Tonker against greed, and explained
that the emeralds were worth less than cheese
until they were safe away from the dreadful
wood.

Everything had been planned, and they
walked now in silence.

No track led up to the sinister gloom of the
trees, either of men or cattle ; not even a
poacher had been there snaring elves for over
a hundred years. You did not trespass twice
in the dells of the gnoles. And, apart from
the things that were done there, the trees
themselves were a warning, and did not wear

THE BOOK OF WONDER

the wholesome look of those that we plant
ourselves.

The nearest village was some miles away
with the backs of all its houses turned to the
wood, and without one window at all facing
in that direction. They did not speak of it
there, and elsewhere it is unheard of.

Into this wood stepped Nuth and Tommy
Tonker. They had no firearms. Tonker had
asked for a pistol, but Nuth replied that the
sound of a shot " would bring everything
down on us," and no more was said about it.

Into the wood they went all day, deeper
and deeper. They saw the skeleton of some
early Georgian poacher nailed to a door in an
oak tree ; sometimes they saw a fairy scuttle
away from them ; once Tonker stepped
heavily on a hard, dry stick, after which they
both lay still for twenty minutes. And the
sunset flared full of omens through the tree
trunks, and night fell, and they came by fitful
starlight, as Nuth had foreseen, to that lean,
high house where the gnoles so secretly dwelt.

All was so silent by that unvalued house
that the faded courage of Tonker flickered up,
but to Nuth's experienced sense it seemed too
silent ; and all the while there was that look
in the sky that was worse than a spoken doom,
so that Nuth, as is often the case when men

NUTH AND THE GNOLES

are in doubt, had leisure to fear the worst.
Nevertheless he did not abandon the business,
but sent the likely lad with the instruments
of his trade by means of the ladder to the old
green casement. And the moment that
Tonker touched the withered boards, the
silence that, though ominous, was earthly,
became unearthly like the touch of a ghoul.
And Tonker heard his breath offending against
that silence, and his heart was like mad drums
in a night attack, and a string of one of his
sandals went tap on a rung of a ladder, and
the leaves of the forest were mute, and the
breeze of the night was still ; and Tonker
prayed that a mouse or a mole might make,
any noise at all, but not a creature stirred,
even Nuth was still. And then and there,
while yet he was undiscovered, the likely lad
made up his mind, as he should have done
before, to leave those colossal emeralds where
they were and have nothing further to do with
the lean, high house of the gnoles, but to quit
this sinister wood in the nick of time and retire
from business at once and buy a place in the
country. Then he descended softly and
beckoned to Nuth. But the gnoles had
watched him through knavish holes that they
bore in trunks of the trees, and the unearthly
silence gave way, as it were with a grace, to

THE BOOK OF WONDER

the rapid screams of Tonker as they picked
him up from behind — screams that came
faster and faster until they were incoherent.
And where they took him it is not good to ask,
and what they did with him I shall not say.

Nuth looked on for a while from the corner
of the house with a mild surprise on his face
as he rubbed his chin, for the trick of the holes
in the trees was new to him ; then he stole
nimbly away through the dreadful wood.

" And did they catch Nuth ? " you ask me,
gentle reader.

" Oh, no, my child " (for such a question is
childish). " Nobody ever catches Nuth."

THE LEAN, HIGH HOUSE OF THE GNOLES

HOW ONE CAME, AS WAS

FORETOLD, TO THE CITY OF

NEVER

THE child that played about the terraces and
gardens in sight of the Surrey hills never knew
that it was he that should come to the Ultimate
City, never knew that he should see the Under
Pits, the barbicans and the holy minarets of
the mightiest city known. I think of him
now as a child with a little red watering-can
going about the gardens on a summer's day
that lit the warm south country, his imagina-
tion delighted with all tales of quite little
adventures, and all the while there was reserved
for him that feat at which men wonder.

Looking in other directions, away from the
Surrey hills, through all his infancy he saw that
precipice that, wall above wall and mountain
above mountain, stands at the edge of the
World, and in perpetual twilight alone with
the Moon and the Sun holds up the incon-
ceivable City of Never. To tread its streets
he was destined ; prophecy knew it. He had

THE BOOK OF WONDER

the magic halter, and a worn old rope it was,
an old wayfaring woman had given it to him :
it had the power to hold any animal whose
race had never known captivity, such as the
unicorn, the hippogriff, Pegasus, dragons and
wyverns ; but with a lion, giraffe, camel or
horse it was useless.

How often we have seen that City of Never,
that marvel of the Nations ! Not when it is
night in the World, and we can see no further
than the stars ; not when the sun is shining
where we dwell, dazzling our eyes ; but when
the sun has set on some stormy day, all at
once repentant at evening, and those glittering
cliffs reveal themselves which we almost take
to be clouds, and it is twilight with us as it is
for ever with them, then on their gleaming
summits we see those golden domes that over-
peer the edges of the World and seem to dance
with dignity and calm in that gentle light of
evening that is Wonder's native haunt. Then
does the city of Never, unvisited and afar,
look long at her sister the World.

It had been prophesied that he should come
there. They knew it when the pebbles were
being made and before the isles of coral were
given unto the sea. And thus the prophecy
came unto fulfilment and passed into history,
and so at length to Oblivion, out of which I

THE CITY OF NEVER

drag it as it goes floating by, into which I shall
one day tumble. The hippogriffs dance before
dawn in the upper air ; long before sunrise
flashes upon our lawns they go to glitter in
light that has not yet come to the World,
and as the dawn works up from the ragged
hills and the stars feel it they go slanting earth-
wards, till sunlight touches the tops of the
tallest trees, and the hippogriffs alight with a
rattle of quills and fold their wings and
gallop and gambol away till they come to
some prosperous, wealthy, detestable town,
and they leap at once from the fields and soar
away from the sight of it, pursued by the
horrible smoke of it until they come again to
the pure blue air.

He whom prophecy had named from of old
to come to the City of Never, went down one
midnight with his magic halter to a lake-side
where the hippogriffs alighted at dawn, for
the turf was soft there and they could gallop
far before they came to a town, and there he
waited near their hoof marks. And the stars
paled a little and grew indistinct ; but there
was no other sign as yet of the dawn, when
there appeared far up in the deeps of night
two little saffron specks, then four and five :
it was the hippogriffs dancing and twirling
around in the sun. Another flock joined them,

THE BOOK OF WONDER

there were twelve of them now ; they danced
there, flashing their colours back to the sun,
they descended in wide curves slowly ; trees
down on earth revealed against the sky, jet-
black each delicate twig ; a star disappeared
from a cluster, now another ; and dawn came
on like music, like a new song. Ducks shot by
to the lake from still dark fields of corn, far
voices uttered, a colour grew upon water, and
still the hippogriffs gloried in the light, revel-
ling up in the sky ; but when pigeons stirred
on the branches and the first small bird was
abroad, and little coots from the rushes
ventured to peer about, then there came down
on a sudden with a thunder of feathers the
hippogriffs, and, as they landed from their
celestial heights all bathed with the day's first
sunlight, the man whose destiny it was from
of old to come to the City of Never, sprang up
and caught the last with the magic halter.
It plunged, but could not escape it, for the
hippogriffs are of the uncaptured races, and
magic has power over the magical, so the man
mounted it, and it soared again for the heights
whence it had come, as a wounded beast goes
home. But when they came to the heights
that venturous rider saw huge and fair to the
left of him the destined City of Never, and he
beheld the towers of Lei and Lek, Neerib and

THE CITY OF NEVER

Akathooma, and the cliffs of Toldenarba a-
glistering in the twilight like an alabaster
statue of the Evening. Towards them . he
wrenched the halter, towards Toldenarba and
the Under Pits ; the wings of the hippogriff
roared as the halter turned him. Of the Under
Pits who shall tell ? Their mystery is secret.
It is held by some that they are the sources
of night, and that darkness pours from them
at evening upon the world ; while others hint
that knowledge of these might undo our
civilization.

There watched him ceaselessly from the Under
Pits those eyes whose duty it is ; from further
within and deeper, the bats that dwell there
arose when they saw the surprise in the eyes ;
the sentinels on the bulwarks beheld that
stream of bats and lifted up their spears as it
were for war. Nevertheless when they per-
ceived that that war for which they watched
was not now come upon them, they lowered
their spears and suffered him to enter, and he
passed whirring through the earthward gate-
way. Even so he came, as foretold, to the City
of Never perched upon Toldenarba, and saw
late twilight on those pinnacles that know no
other light. All the domes were of copper,
but the spires on their summits were gold.
Little steps of onyx ran all this way and that.

THE BOOK OF WONDER

With cobbled agates were its streets a glory.
Through small square panes of rose-quartz the
citizens looked from their houses. To them as
they looked abroad the Wor]d far-off seemed
happy. Clad though that city was in one robe
always, in twilight, yet was its beauty worthy
of even so lovely a wonder : city and twilight
both were peerless but for each other. Built
of a stone unknown in the world we tread were
its bastions, quarried we know not where, but
called by the gnomes abyx, it so flashed back
to the twilight its glories, colour for colour,
that none can say of them where their boundary
is, and which the eternal twilight, and which
the city of Never ; they are the twin-born
children, the fairest daughters of Wonder.
Time had been there, but not to work destruc-
tion ; he had turned to a fair, pale green the
domes that were made of copper, the rest he
had left untouched, even he, the destroyer of
cities, by what bribe I know not averted.
Nevertheless they often wept in Never for
change and passing away, mourning catas-
trophes in other worlds, and they built temples
sometimes to ruined stars that had fallen
flaming down from the Milky Way, giving
them worship still when by us long since for-
gotten. Other temples they have — who knows
to what divinities ?

THE CITY OF NEVER

And he that was destined alone of men to
come to the City of Never was well content to
behold it as he trotted down its agate street,
with the wings of his hippogriff furled, seeing
at either side of him marvel on marvel of which
even China is ignorant. Then as he neared the
city's further rampart by which no inhabitant
stirred, and looked in a direction to which no
houses faced with any rose-pink windows, he
suddenly saw far-off, dwarfing the mountains,
an even greater city. Whether that city was
built upon the twilight or whether it rose from
the coasts of some other world he did not
know. He saw it dominate the City of Never,
and strove to reach it ; but at this unmeasured
home of unknown colossi the hippogriff shied
frantically, and neither the magic halter nor
anything that he did could make the monster
face it. At last, from the city of Never 's lonely
outskirts where no inhabitants walked, the
rider turned slowly earthwards, he knew now
why all the windows faced this way — the
denizens of the twilight gazed at the world
and not at a greater than them. Then from
the last step of the earthward stairway, like
lead past the Under Pits and down the glitter-
ing face of Toldenarba, down from the over-
shadowed glories of the gold-tipped City of
Never and out of perpetual twilight, swooped

G 81

THE BOOK OF WONDER

the man on his winged monster : the wind that
slept at the time leaped up like a dog at their
onrush, it uttered a cry and ran past them.
Down on the World it was morning ; night
was roaming away with his cloak trailed behind
him, white mists turned over and over as he
went, the orb was grey but it glittered, lights
blinked surprisingly in early windows, forth
over wet, dim fields went cows from their
houses : even in this hour touched the fields
again the feet of the hippogriff. And the
moment that the man dismounted and took
off his magic halter the hippogriff flew slanting
away with a whirr, going back to some airy
dancing-place of his people.

And he that surmounted glittering Tol-
denarba and came alone of men to the City of
Never has his name and his fame among
nations ; but he and the people of that twilit
city well know two things unguessed by other
men, they that there is a city fairer than theirs,
and he — a deed unaccomplished.

THE CORONATION OF
MR. THOMAS SHAP

IT was the occupation of Mr. Thomas Shap to
persuade customers that the goods were
genuine and of an excellent quality, and that
as regards the price their unspoken will was
consulted. And in order to carry on this occu-
pation he went by train very early every
morning some few miles nearer to the City
from the suburb in which he slept. This was
the use to which he put his life.

From the moment when he first perceived
(not as one reads a thing in a book, but as
truths are revealed to one's instinct) the very
beastliness of his occupation, and of the house
that he slept in, its shape, make and preten-
sions, and of even the clothes that he wore ;
from that moment he withdrew his dreams
from it, his fancies, his ambitions, everything
in fact except that ponderable Mr. Shap that
dressed in a frock-coat, bought tickets and
handled money and could in turn be handled
by the statistician. The priest's share in Mr.

THE BOOK OF WONDER

Shap, the share of the poet, never caught the
early train to the City at all.

He used to take little flights with his fancy
at first, dwelt all day in his dreamy way on
fields and rivers lying in the sunlight where
it strikes the world more brilliantly further
South. And then he began to imagine butter-
flies there ; after that, silken people and the
temples they built to their gods.

They noticed that he was silent, and even
absent at times, but they found no fault with
his behaviour with customers, to whom he
remained as plausible as of old. So he dreamed
for a year, and his fancy gained strength as he
dreamed. He still read halfpenny papers in
the train, still discussed the passing day's
ephemeral topic, still voted at elections,
though he no longer did these things with
the whole Shap — his soul was no longer in
them.

He had had a pleasant year, his imagination
was all new to him still, and it had often dis-
covered beautiful things away where it went,
south-east at the edge of the twilight. And he
had a matter-of-fact and logical mind, so that
he often said, " Why should I pay my two-
pence at the electric theatre when I can see all
sorts of things quite easily without ? " What-
ever he did was logical before anything else,

THE CORONATION OF MR. SHAP

and those that knew him always spoke of Shap
as " a sound, sane, level-headed man."

On far the most important day of his life he
went as usual to town by the early train to sell
plausible articles to customers, while the
spiritual Shap roamed off to fanciful lands.
As he walked from the station, dreamy but
wide awake, it suddenly struck him that the
real Shap was not the one walking to Business
in black and ugly clothes, but he who roamed
along a jungle's edge near the ramparts of an old
and Eastern city that rose up sheer from the
sand, and against which the desert lapped with
one eternal wave. He used to fancy the name
of that city was Larkar. " After all, the fancy
is as real as the body," he said with perfect
logic. It was a dangerous theory.

For that other life that he led he realized,
as in Business, the importance and value of
method. He did not let his fancy roam too
far until it perfectly knew its first surroundings.
Particularly he avoided the jungle — he was not
afraid to meet a tiger there (after all it was not
real), but stranger things might crouch there.
Slowly he built up Larkar : rampart by ram-
part, towers for archers, gateway of brass, and
all. And then one day he argued, and quite
rightly, that all the silk-clad people in its streets,
their camels, their wares that came from Inkus-

THE BOOK OF WONDER

tahn, the city itself, were all the things of his
will — and then he made himself King. He smiled
after that when people did not raise their hats
to him in the street, as he walked from the
station to Business ; but he was sufficiently
practical to recognize that it was better not
to talk of this to those that only knew him as
Mr. Shap.

Now that he was King in the city of Larkar
and in all the desert that lay to the East and
North he sent his fancy to wander further
afield. He took the regiments of his camel-
guard and went jingling out of Larkar, with
little silver bells under the camels' chins, and
came to other cities far-off on the yellow sand,
with clear white walls and towers, uplifting
themselves in the sun. Through their gates
he passed with his three silken regiments, the
light-blue regiment of the camel-guard being
upon his right and the green regiment riding
at his left, the lilac regiment going on before.
When he had gone through the streets of any
city and observed the ways of its people, and
had seen the way that the sunlight struck its
towers, he would proclaim himself King there,
and then ride on in fancy. So he passed from
city to city and from land to land. Clear-
sighted though Mr. Shap was, I think he over-
looked the lust of aggrandizement to which

i THE CORONATION OF MR. SHAP

kings have so often been victims : and so it was
that when the first few cities had opened their
gleaming gates and he saw people prostrate
before his camel, and spearmen cheering along
countless balconies, and priests come out to do
him reverence, he that had never had even the
lowliest authority in the familiar world became
unwisely insatiate. He let his fancy ride at
inordinate speed, he forsook method, scarce was
he king of a land but he yearned to extend his
borders ; so he journeyed deeper and deeper
into the wholly unknown. The concentration
that he gave to this inordinate progress through
countries of which history is ignorant and cities
so fantastic in their bulwarks that, though their
inhabitants were human, yet the foe that they
feared seemed something less or more ; the
amazement with which he beheld gates and
towers unknown even to art, and furtive people
thronging intricate ways to acclaim him as their
sovereign ; all these things began to affect his
capacity for Business. He knew as well as any
that his fancy could not rule these beautiful
lands unless that other Shap, however unim-
portant, were well sheltered and fed : and
shelter and food meant money, and money,
Business. His was more like the mistake of
some gambler with cunning schemes who over-
looks human greed. One day his fancy, riding

THE BOOK OF WONDER

in the morning, came to a city gorgeous as the
sunrise, in whose opalescent wall were gates of
gold, so huge that a river poured between the
bars, floating in, when the gates were opened,
large galleons under sail. Thence there came
dancing out a company with instruments, and
made a melody all round the wall ; that
morning Mr. Shap, the bodily Shap in London,
forgot the train to town.

Until a year ago he had never imagined at
all ; it is not to be wondered at that all these
things now newly seen by his fancy should play
tricks at first with the memory of even so sane a
man. He gave up reading the papers altogether,
he lost all interest in politics, he cared less and
less for things that were going on around
him. This unfortunate missing of the morning
train even occurred again, and the firm spoke to
him severely about it. But he had his consola-
tion. Were not Arathrion and Argun Zeerith and
all the level coasts of Oora his ? And even as
the firm found fault with him his fancy watched
the yaks on weary journeys, slow specks
against the snow-fields, bringing tribute ;
and saw the green eyes of the mountain men
who had looked at him strangely in the City
of Nith when he had entered it by the desert
door. Yet his logic did not forsake him ; he
knew well that his strange subjects did not

THE CORONATION OF MR. SHAP

exist, but he was prouder of having created
them with his brain, than merely of ruling
them only ; thus in his pride he felt himself
something more great than a king, he did not
dare to think what ! He went into the temple
of the city of Zorra and stood some time there
alone : all the priests kneeled to him when he
came away.

He cared less and less for the things we care
about, for the affairs of Shap, a business-man
in London. He began to despise the man with
a royal contempt.

One day when he sat in Sowla, the city of
the Thuls, throned on one amethyst, he decided,
and it was proclaimed on the moment by silver
trumpets all along the land, that he would be
crowned as the king over all the lands of
Wonder.

By that old temple where the Thuls were
worshipped, year in, year out, for over a
thousand years, they pitched pavilions in the
open air. The trees that blew there threw out
radiant scents unknown in any countries that
know the map ; the stars blazed fiercely for
that famous occasion. A fountain hurled up,
clattering, ceaselessly into the air armfuls on
armfuls of diamonds, a deep hush waited for
the golden trumpets, the holy coronation night
was come. At the top of those old, worn steps,

THE BOOK OF WONDER

going down we know not whither, stood the
king in the emerald-and-amethyst cloak, the
ancient garb of the Thuls ; beside him lay that
Sphinx that for the last few weeks had advised
him in his affairs.

Slowly, with music when the trumpets
sounded, came up towards him from we know
not where, one - hundred - and - twenty arch-
bishops, twenty angels and two archangels,
with that terrific crown, the diadem of the
Thuls. They knew as they came up to him
that promotion awaited them all because of
this night's work. Silent, majestic, the king
awaited them.

The doctors downstairs were sitting over
their supper, the warders softly slipped from
room to room, and when in that cosy dormitory
of Hanwell they saw the king still standing
erect and royal, his face resolute, they came up
to him and addressed him : " Go to bed,"
they said — " pretty bed." So he lay down and
soon was fast asleep : the great day was over.

THE CORONATION OF MR. THOMAS SHAP

CHU-BU AND SHEEMISH

IT was the custom on Tuesdays in the temple of
Chu-bu for the priests to enter at evening and
chant, " There is none but Chu-bu/'

And all the people rejoiced and cried out,
" There is none but Chu-bu." And honey was
offered to Chu-bu, and maize and fat. Thus
was he magnified.

Chu-bu was an idol of some antiquity, as may
be seen from the colour of the wood. He had
been carved out of mahogany, and after he
was carved he had been polished. Then they
had set him up on the diorite pedestal with the
brazier in front of it for burning spices and
the flat gold plates for fat. Thus they wor-
shipped Chu-bu.

He must have been there for over a hundred

years when one day the priests came in with

another idol into the temple of Chu-bu, and

set it on a pedestal near Chu-bu's and sang,

' There is also Sheemish."

And all the people rejoiced and cried out,
" There is also Sheemish."

THE BOOK OF WONDER

Sheemish was palpably a modern idol, and
although the wood was stained with a dark-red
dye, you could see that he had only just been
carved. And honey was offered to Sheemish
as well as Chu-bu, and also maize and fat.

The fury of Chu-bu knew no time-limit ; he
was furious all that night, and next day he was
furious still. The situation called for immediate
miracles. To devastate the city with a pesti-
lence and kill all his priests was scarcely within
his power, therefore he wisely concentrated
such divine powers as he had in commanding
a little earthquake. " Thus," thought Chu-bu,
" will I reassert myself as the only god, and
men shall spit upon Sheemish."

Chu-bu willed it and willed it and still no
earthquake came, when suddenly he was aware
that the hated Sheemish was daring to attempt
a miracle too. He ceased to busy himself about
the earthquake and listened, or shall I say felt,
for what Sheemish was thinking ; for gods
are aware of what passes in the mind by a
sense that is other than any of our five.
Sheemish was trying to make an earthquake
too.

The new god's motive was probably to assert
himself. I doubt if Chu-bu understood or
cared for his motive, it was sufficient for an
idol already aflame with jealousy that his

CHU-BU AND SHEEMISH

detestable rival was on the verge of a miracle.
All the power of Chu-bu veered round at once
and set dead against an earthquake, even a
little one. It was thus in the temple of Chu-bu
for some time, and then no earthquake came.

To be a god and to fail to achieve a miracle
is a despairing sensation ; it is as though
among men one should determine upon a
hearty sneeze and as though no sneeze should
come ; it is as though one should try to swim
in heavy boots or remember a name that
is utterly forgotten : all these pains were
Sheemish's.

And upon Tuesday the priests came in, and
the people, and they did worship Chu-bu and
offered fat to him, saying, " O Chu-bu who
made everything," and then the priests sang,
" There is also Sheemish," and again the people
rejoiced and cried out, " There is also
Sheemish " ; and Chu-bu was put to shame
and spake not for three days.

Now there were holy birds in the temple of
Chu-bu, and when the third day was come and
the night thereof, it was as it were revealed to
the mind of Chu-bu, that there was dirt upon
the head of Sheemish.

And Chu-bu spake unto Sheemish as speak
the gods, moving no lips nor yet disturbing
the silence, saying, " There is dirt upon thy

THE BOOK OF WONDER

head, O Sheemish." All night long he muttered
again and again, " There is dirt upon Sheemish's
head." And when it was dawn and voices
were heard far off, Chu-bu became exultant
with Earth's awakening things, and cried out
till the sun was high, " Dirt, dirt, dirt, upon
the head of Sheemish," and at noon he said,
" So Sheemish would be a god." Thus was
Sheemish confounded.

And with Tuesday one came and washed his
head with rose-water, and he was worshipped
again when they sang " There is also Sheemish."
And yet was Chu-bu content, for he said,
" The head of Sheemish has been defiled," and
again, " His head was denied, it is enough."
And one evening lo ! there was dirt on the
head of Chu-bu also, and the thing was per-
ceived of Sheemish.

It is not with the gods as it is with men.
We are angry one with another and turn from
our anger again, but the wrath of the gods is
enduring. Chu-bu remembered and Sheemish
did not forget. They spake as we do not speak,
in silence yet heard of each other, nor were
their thoughts as our thoughts. We should
not judge them by merely human standards.
All night long they spake and all night
said these words only : " Dirty Chu-bu,"
" Dirty Sheemish." " Dirty Chu-bu," " Dirty

CHU-BU AND SHEEMISH

Sheemish," all night long. Their wrath had
not tired at dawn, and neither had wearied
of his accusation. And gradually Chu-bu came
to realize that he was nothing more than the
equal of Sheemish. All gods are jealous, but
this equality with the upstart Sheemish, a
thing of painted wood a hundred years newer
than Chu-bu; and this worship given to
Sheemish in Chu-bu's own temple, were par-
ticularly bitter. Chu-bu was jealous even for
a god ; and when Tuesday came again, the
third day of Sheemish's worship, Chu-bu could
bear it no longer. He felt that his anger must
be revealed at all costs, and he returned with
all the vehemence of his will to achieving a
little earthquake. The worshippers had just
gone from his temple when Chu-bu settled his
will to attain this miracle, now and then his
meditations were disturbed by the now familiar
dictum, " Dirty Chu-bu," but Chu-bu willed
ferociously, not even stopping to say what he
longed to say and had already said nine
hundred times, and presently even these inter-
ruptions ceased.

They ceased because Sheemish had returned
to a project that he had never definitely aban-
doned, the desire to assert himself and exalt
himself over Chu-bu by performing a miracle,
and the district being volcanic he had chosen

THE BOOK OF WONDER

a little earthquake as the miracle most easily
accomplished by a small god.

Now an earthquake that is commanded by
two gods has double the chance of fulfilment
than when it is willed by one, and an incal-
culably greater chance than when two gods are
pulling different ways ; as, to take the case of
older and greater gods, when the sun and the
moon pull in the same direction we have the
biggest tides.

Chu-bu knew nothing of the theory of tides
and was too much occupied with his miracle
to notice what Sheemish was doing. And
suddenly the miracle was an accomplished
thing.

It was a very local earthquake, for there are
other gods than Chu-bu or even Sheemish, and
it was only a little one as the gods had willed,
but it loosened some monoliths in a colonnade
that supported one side of the temple and the
whole of one wall fell in, and the low huts of
the people of that city were shaken a little and
some of their doors were jammed so that they
would not open ; it was enough, and for a
moment it seemed that it was all ; neither
Chu-bu nor Sheemish commanded there should
be more, but they had set in motion an old
law older than Chu-bu, the law of gravity
that that colonnade had held back for a

CHU-BU AND SHEEMISH

hundred years, and the temple of Chu-bu
quivered and then stood still, swayed once
and was overthrown, on the heads of Chu-bu
and Sheemish.

No one rebuilt it, for nobody dared go near
such terrible gods. Some said that Chu-bu
wrought the miracle, but some said Sheemish,
and thereof schism was born ; the weakly
amiable, alarmed by the bitterness of rival
sects, sought compromise and said that both
had wrought it, but no one guessed the truth
that the thing was done in rivalry.

And a saying arose, and both sects held
this belief in common, that whoso toucheth
Chu-bu shall die or whoso looketh upon
Sheemish.

That is how Chu-bu came into my possession
when I travelled once beyond the Hills of
Ting. I found him in the fallen temple of Chu-
bu with his hands and toes sticking up out of
the rubbish, lying upon his back, and in this
attitude just as I found him I keep him to this
day on my mantelpiece, as he is less liable to
be upset that way. Sheemish was broken, so
I left him where he was.

And there is something so helpless about
Chu-bu with his fat hands stuck up in the air
that sometimes I am moved out of compassion
to bow down to him and pray, saying, " O

H 97

THE BOOK OF WONDER

Chu-bu, thou that made everything, help thy
servant."

Chu-bu cannot do much, though once I am
sure that at a game of bridge he sent me the ace
of trumps after I had not held a card worth
having for the whole of the evening. And
chance could have done as much as that for me,
but I do not tell this to Chu-bu.

THE WONDERFUL WINDOW

THE old man in the Oriental-looking robe was
being moved on by the police, and it was this
that attracted to him and the parcel under his
arm the attention of Mr. Sladden, whose live-
lihood was earned in the emporium of Messrs.
Mergin and Chater, that is to say in their
establishment.

Mr. Sladden had the reputation of being the
silliest young man in Business ; a touch of
romance — a mere suggestion of it — would send
his eyes gazing away as though the walls of
the emporium were of gossamer and London
itself a myth, instead of attending to customers.

Merely the fact that the dirty piece of paper
that wrapped the old man's parcel was covered
with Arabic writing was enough to give Mr.
Sladden the idea of romance, and he followed
until the little crowd fell off and the stranger
stopped by the kerb and unwrapped his parcel
and prepared to sell the thing that was inside
it. It was a little window in old wood with
small panes set in lead ; it was not much more

THE BOOK OF WONDER

than a foot in breadth and was under two feet
long. Mr. Sladden had never before seen a
window sold in the street, so he asked the price
of it.

" Its price is all you possess," said the old
man.

" Where did you get it ? " said Mr. Sladden,
for it was a strange window.

" I gave all that I possessed for it in the
streets of Baghdad."

" Did you possess much ? " said Mr. Sladden.

" I had all that I wanted," he said, " except
this window."

" It must be a good window," said the young
man.

" It is a magical window," said the old one.

" I have only ten shillings on me, but I
have fifteen-and-six at home."

The old man thought for a while.

" Then twenty-five-and-sixpence is the price
of the window," he said.

It was only when the bargain was completed
and the ten shillings paid and the strange old
man was coming for his fifteen-and-six and to
fit the magical window into his only room that
it occurred to Mr. Sladden's mind that he did
not want a window. And then they were at
the door of the house in which he rented a room,
and it seemed too late to explain.

100

THE WONDERFUL WINDOW

The stranger demanded privacy while he
fitted up the window, so Mr. Sladden remained
outside the door at the top of a little
flight of creaky stairs. He heard no sound of
hammering.

And presently the strange old man came
out with his faded yellow robe and his great
beard, and his eyes on far-off places. "It is
finished," he said, and he and the young man
parted. And whether he remained a spot of
colour and an anachronism in London, or
whether he ever came again to Baghdad, and
what dark hands kept on the circulation of
his twenty-five-and-six, Mr. Sladden never
knew.

Mr. Sladden entered the bare-boarded room
in which he slept and spent all his indoor
hours between closing-time and the hour at
which Messrs. Mergin and Chater commenced.
To the Penates of so dingy a room his neat
frock-coat must have been a continual wonder.
Mr. Sladden took it off and folded it carefully ;
and there was the old man's window rather
high up in the wall. There had been no
window in that wall hitherto, nor any ornament
at all but a small cupboard, so when Mr.
Sladden had put his frock-coat safely away he
glanced through his new window. It was
where his cupboard had been in which he kept

H2 101

THE BOOK OF WONDER

his tea-things : they were all standing on the
table now. When Mr. Sladden glanced through
his new window it was late in a summer's
evening ; the butterflies some while ago would
have closed their wings, though the bat would
scarcely yet be drifting abroad — but this was
in London : the shops were shut and street-
lamps not yet lighted.

Mr. Sladden rubbed his eyes, then rubbed
the window, and still he saw a sky of blazing
blue, and far, far down beneath him, so that
no sound came up from it or smoke of chimneys,
a mediaeval city set with towers. Brown roofs
and cobbled streets, and then white walls and
buttresses, and beyond them bright green
fields and tiny streams. On the towers archers
lolled, and along the walls were pikemen, and
now and then a wagon went down some old-
world street and lumbered through the gate-
way and out to the country, and now and then
a wagon drew up to the city from the mist that
was rolling with evening over the fields.
Sometimes folk put their heads out of lattice
windows, sometimes some idle troubadour
seemed to sing, and nobody hurried or troubled
about anything. Airy and dizzy though the
distance was, for Mr. Sladden seemed higher
above the city than any cathedral gargoyle,
yet one clear detail he obtained as a clue : the

102

THE WONDERFUL WINDOW

banners floating from every tower over the
idle archers had little golden dragons all over
a pure white field.

He heard the motor-buses roar by his other
window, he heard the newsboys howling.

Mr. Sladden grew dreamier than ever after
that on the premises, in the establishment, of
Messrs. Mergin and Chater. But in one matter
he was wise and wakeful : he made continuous
and careful inquiries about golden dragons on
a white flag, and talked to no one of his wonder-
ful window. He came to know the flags of every
king in Europe, he even dabbled in history,
he made inquiries at shops that understood
heraldry, but nowhere could he learn any trace
of little dragons or on a field argent. And when
it seemed that for him alone those golden
dragons had fluttered he came to love them as
an exile in some desert might love the lilies
of his home or as a sick man might love
swallows when he cannot easily live to another
spring.

As soon as Messrs. Mergin and Chater closed,
Mr. Sladden used to go back to his dingy room
and gaze through the wonderful window until
it grew dark in the city and the guard would go
with a lantern round the ramparts and the
night came up like velvet, full of strange stars.
Another clue he tried to obtain one night by

103

THE BOOK OF WONDER

jotting down the shapes of the constellations,
but this led him no further, for they were unlike
any that shone upon either hemisphere.

Each day as soon as he woke he went first to
the wonderful window, and there was the city,
diminutive in the distance, all shining in the
morning, and the golden dragons dancing in
the sun, and the archers stretching themselves
or swinging their arms on the top of the windy
towers. The window would not open, so that
he never heard the songs that the troubadours
sang down there beneath gilded balconies ;
he did not even hear the belfries' chimes,
though he saw the jackdaws routed every hour
from their homes. And the first thing that
he always did was to cast his eye round all the
little towers that rose up from the ramparts
to see that the little golden dragons were flying
there on their flags. And when he saw them
flaunting themselves on white folds from every
tower against the marvellous deep blue of the
sky he dressed contentedly, and, taking one last
look, went off to his work with a glory in his
mind. It would have been difficult for the
customers of Messrs. Mergin and Chater to
guess the precise ambition of Mr. Sladden
as he walked before them in his neat frock-coat :
it was that he might be a man-at-arms or an
archer in order to fight for the little golden

104

THE WONDERFUL WINDOW ,

dragons that flew on a white flag for an un-
known king in an inaccessible city. At first
Mr. Sladden used to walk round and round the
mean street that he lived in, but he gained no
clue from that ; and soon he noticed that
quite different winds blew below his wonderful
window from those that blew on the other side
of the house.

In August the evenings began to grow
shorter : this was the very remark that the
other employes made to him at the emporium,
so that he almost feared that they suspected
his secret, and he had much less time for the
wonderful window, for lights were few down
there and they blinked out early.

One morning late in August, just before he
went to Business, Mr. Sladden saw a company
of pikemen running down the cobbled road
towards the gateway of the mediaeval city —
Golden Dragon City he used to call it alone in
his own mind, but he never spoke of it to any-
one. The next thing that he noticed was that
the archers on the towers were talking a good
deal together and were handing round bundles
of arrows in addition to the quivers which they
wore. Heads were thrust out of windows more
than usual, a woman ran out and called some
children indoors, a knight rode down the street,
and then more pikemen appeared along the

105

THE BOOK OF WONDER

walls, and all the jackdaws were in the air. In
the street no troubadour sang. Mr. Sladden
took one look along the towers to see that the
flags were flying, and all the golden dragons
were streaming in the wind. Then he had to
go to Business. He took a 'bus back that
evening and ran upstairs. Nothing seemed
to be happening in Golden Dragon City except
a crowd in the cobbled street that led down
to the gateway ; the archers seemed to be
reclining as usual lazily in their towers, then
a white flag went down with all its golden
dragons ; he did not see at first that all the
archers were dead. The crowd was pouring
towards him, towards the precipitous wall from
which he looked, men with a white flag covered
with golden dragons were moving backwards
slowly, men with another flag were pressing
them, a flag on which there was one huge red
bear. Another banner went down upon a
tower. Then he saw it all : the golden dragons
were being beaten — his little golden dragons.
The men of the bear were coming under the
window ; whatever he threw from that height
would fall with terrific force : fire-irons, coal,
his clock, whatever he had — he would fight
for his little golden dragons yet. A flame
broke out from one of the towers and licked
the feet of a reclining archer ; he did not stir.

106

THE WONDERFUL WINDOW

And now the alien standard was out of sight
directly underneath. Mr. Sladden broke the
panes of the wonderful window and wrenched
away with a poker the lead that held them.
Just as the glass broke he saw a banner covered
with golden dragons fluttering still, and then
as he drew back to hurl the poker there came
to him the scent of mysterious spices, and
there was nothing there, not even the daylight,
for behind the fragments of the wonderful
window was nothing but that small cupboard
in which he kept his tea-things.

And though Mr. Sladden is older now and
knows more of the world, and even has a
Business of his own, he has never been able
to buy such another window, and has not ever
since, either from books or men, heard any
rumour at all of Golden Dragon City.

107

EPILOGUE

HERE the fourteenth Episode of the Book of
Wonder endeth and here the relating of the
Chronicles of Little Adventures at the Edge
of the World. I take farewell of my readers.
But it may be we shall even meet again, for it
is still to be told how the gnomes robbed the
fairies, and of the vengeance that the fairies
took, and how even the gods themselves were
troubled thereby in their sleep ; and how the
King of Ool insulted the troubadours, thinking
himself safe among his scores of archers and
hundreds of halberdiers, and how the trouba-
dours stole to his towers by night, and under
his battlements by the light of the moon made,
that king ridiculous for ever in song. But for
this I must first return to the Edge of the
World. Behold, the caravans start.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND.

PR Dunsany, Edward John Moreton

6007 Drax Plunkett

U6B6 The book of wonder C2d ed.3

1919

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

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